Some reminiscences

SOME REMINISCENCES

^1uc

. SOME
REMINISCENCES

WORKS BY

JOSEPH CONRAD

TALES OF UNREST
ALMAYER'S FOLLY
AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS
THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS
YOUTH AND OTHER STORIES
TYPHOON AND OTHER STORIES
LORD JIM

THE SECRET AGENT
THE MIRROR OF THE SEA
UNDER WESTERN EYES
Etc. Etc.

SOME
REMINISCENCES

By JOSEPH CONRAD

LONDON
EVELEIGH NASH

1912

PR

//

I , f E^ ' '''' ...

/

A FAMILIAR PREFACE

As a general rule we do not want much
encouragement to talk about ourselves ;
yet this little book is the result of a friendly
suggestion, and even of a little friendly
pressure. I defended myself with some
spirit ; but, with characteristic tenacity,
the friendly voice insisted : " You know,
you really must."

It was not an argument, but I submitted
at once. If one must ! . . .

You perceive the force of a word. He \
who wants to persuade should put his trust,
not in the right argument, but in the right
word. The power of sound has always been
greater than the power of sense. I don't
say this by way of disparagement. It is
better for mankind to be impressionable
than reflective. Nothing humanely great
— great, I mean, as affecting a whole mass
of lives — has come from reflection. On the
other hand, you cannot fail to see the power
of mere words ; such words as Glory, for
instance, or Pity. I won't mention any

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more. They are not far to seek. Shouted
with perseverance, with ardour, with con-
viction, these two by their sound alone
have set whole nations in motion and
upheaved the dry, hard ground on which
rests our whole social fabric. There's
" virtue " for you if you like ! ... Of
course the accent must be attended to.
The right accent. That's very important.
The capacious lung, the thundering or the
tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me of
your Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-
minded person with a mathematical imagina-
tion. Mathematics command all my respect,
but I have no use for engines. Give me
the right word and the right accent and
I will move the world.

What a dream — for a writer ! Because
written words have their accent too. Yes !
Let me only find the right word ! Surely
it must be lying somewhere amongst the
wreckage of all the plaints and all the
exultations poured out aloud since the
first day when hope, the undying, came
down on earth. It may be there, close by,
disregarded, invisible, quite at hand. But
it's no good. I believe there are men who
can lay hold of a needle in a pottle of hay
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at the first try. For myself, I have never
had such luck.

And then there is that accent. Another
difficulty. For who is going to tell whether
the accent is right or ^vrong till the word
is shouted, and fails to be heard, perhaps,
and goes down-wind leaving the world
unmoved. Once upon a time there lived
an Emperor who was a sage and something
of a literary man. He jotted down on ivory
tablets thoughts, maxims, reflections which
chance has preserved for the edification of
posterity. Amongst other sayings — I am
quoting from memory — I remember this
solemn admonition : " Let all thy words
have the accent of heroic truth." The
accent of heroic truth ! This is very fine,
but I am thinking that it is an easy matter
for an austere Emperor to jot down grandiose
advice. Most of the working truths on this
earth are humble, not heroic : and there
have been times in the history of mankind
when the accents of heroic truth have moved
it to nothing but derision.

Nobody will expect to find between the
covers of this little book words of extra-
ordinary potency or accents of irresistible
heroism. However humiliating for my self-

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esteem, I must confess that the counsels of
Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are
more fit for a morahst than for an artist.
Truth of a modest sort I can promise you,
and also sincerity. That complete, praise-
worthy sincerity which, while it delivers
one into the hands of one's enemies, is
as likely as not to embroil one with one's
friends.

" Embroil " is perhaps too strong an
expression. I can't imagine either amongst
my enemies or my friends a being so hard
up for something to do as to quarrel with
me. " To disappoint one's friends " would
be nearer the mark. Most, almost all,
friendships of the writing period of my life
have come to me through my books ; and
\ I know that a novelist lives in his work.
He stands there, the only reality in an
invented world, amongst imaginary things,
happenings, and people. Writing about them,
he is only writing about himself. But the
disclosure is not complete. He remains to a
certain extent a figure behind the veil ;
a suspected rather than a seen presence —
a movement and a voice behind the draperies
of fiction. In these personal notes there
is no such veil. And I cannot help think-
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ing of a passage in the " Imitation of
Christ " where the ascetic author, who
knew Hfe so profoundly, says that " there
are persons esteemed on their reputa-
tion who by showing themselves destroy
the opinion one had of them." This
is the danger incurred by an author of
fiction who sets out to talk about himself
without disguise.

While these reminiscent pages were
appearing serially I was remonstrated with
for bad economy ; as if such writing were
a form of self-indulgence wasting the sub-
stance of future volumes. It seems that
I am not sufficiently literary. Indeed a
man who never wrote a line for print till
he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to
look upon his existence and his experience,
upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations and
emotions, upon his memories and his regrets,
and the whole possession of his past, as only
so much material for his hands. Once
before, some three years ago, when I pub-
lished "The Mirror of the Sea," a volume of
impressions and memories, the same remarks
were made to me. Practical remarks. But,
truth to say, I have never understood the
kind of thrift they recommended. I wanted

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to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and
its men, to whom I remain indebted for
so much which has gone to make me what
I am. That seemed to me the only shape
in which I could offer it to their shades.
There could not be a question in my mind
of anything else. It is quite possible that
I am a bad economist ; but it is certain
that I am incorrigible.

Having matured in the surroundings and
under the special conditions of sea-life, I have
a special piety towards that form of my
past ; for its impressions were vivid, its
appeal direct, its demands such as could
be responded to with the natural elation
of youth and strength equal to the call.
There was nothing in them to perplex a
young conscience. Having broken away
from my origins under a storm of blame
from every quarter which had the merest
shadow of right to voice an opinion, re-
moved by great distances from such natural
affections as were still left to me, and even
estranged, in a measure, from them by the
totally unintelligible character of the life
which had seduced me so mysteriously
from my allegiance, I may safely say that
through the blind force of circumstances
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the sea was to be all my world and the
merchant service my only home for a long
succession of years. No wonder then that
Un my two exclusively sea books, " The Nigger
of the Narcissus " and " The Mirror of the Sea "
(and in the few short sea stories like " Youth "
and " Typhoon "), I have tried with an almost
filial regard to render the vibration of life
in the great world of waters, in the hearts
of the simple men who have for ages
traversed its solitudes, and also that some-
thing sentient which seems to dwell in
ships — the creatures of their hands and
the objects of their care.

One's literary life must turn frequently
for sustenance to memories and seek dis-
course with the shades ; unless one has
made up one's mind to write only in order
to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise
it for what it is not, or — generally — to teach
it how to behave. Being neither quarrel-
some, nor a flatterer, nor a sage, I have
done none of these things ; and I am
prepared to put up serenely with the in-
significance which attaches to persons who
are not meddlesome in some way or
other. But resignation is not indifference.

I would not like to be left standing as a
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mere spectator on the bank of the great
stream carrying onwards so many lives.
I would fain claim for myself the faculty
of so much insight as can be expressed in
a voice of sympathy and compassion.

It seems to me that in one, at least,
authoritative quarter of criticism I am sus-
pected of a certain unemotional, grim
acceptance of facts ; of what the French
would call secheresse du cceur. Fifteen
years of unbroken silence before praise or
blame testify sufficiently to my respect for
criticism, that fine flower of personal expres-
sion in the garden of letters. But this is
more of a personal matter, reaching the
man behind the work, and therefore it may
be alluded to in a volume which is a personal
note in the margin of the public page.
Not that I feel hurt in the least. The charge
— if it amounted to a charge at all — was made
in the most considerate terms ; in a tone of
regret.

My answer is that if it be true that every
novel contains an element of autobiography
— and this can hardly be denied, since the
creator can only express himself in his
creation — then there are some of us to
whom an open display of sentiment is
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repugnant. I would not unduly praise the
virtue of restraint. It is often merely
temperamental. But it is not always a
sign of coldness. It may be pride. There
can be nothing more humiliating than to
see the shaft of one's emotion miss the
mark either of laughter or tears. Nothing
more humiliating ! And this for the reason
that should the mark be missed, should
the open display of emotion fail to move,
then it must perish unavoidably in disgust
or contempt. No artist can be reproached
for shrinking from a risk which only fools
run to meet and only genius dare confront
with impunity. In a task which mainly
consists in laying one's soul more or less
bare to the world, a regard for decency,
even at the cost of success, is but the regard
for one's own dignity which is inseparably
united with the dignity of one's work»

And then — it is very difficult to be
wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth.
The comic, when it is human, soon takes
upon itself a face of pain ; and some of
our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the
capacity for suffering which makes man
august in the eyes of men) have their source
in weaknesses which must be recognised

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with smiling compassion as the common
inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in
this world pass into each other, mingling
their forms and their murmurs in the
twilight of life as mysterious as an over-
shadowed ocean, while the dazzUng bright-
ness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating
and still, on the distant edge of the horizon.
/ Yes ! I too would like to hold the
/ magic wand giving that command over
{ laughter and tears which is declared to
? be the highest achievement of imaginative
literature. Only, to be a great magician
one must surrender oneself to occult and
irresponsible powers, either outside or within
one's own breast. We have all heard of
simple men selling their souls for love or
power to some grotesque devil. The most
ordinary intelligence can perceive without
much reflection that anything of the sort
is bound to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay
claim to particular wisdom because of my
dislike and distrust of such transactions.
("T^t may be my sea-training acting upon a
natural disposition to keep good hold on
the one thing really mine, but the fact is
that I have a positive horror of losing even
for one moving moment that full possession
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A FAMILIAR PREFACE

of myself which is the first condition of
good service. And I have carried my notion
of good service from my earher into my
later existence. I, who have never sought
in the written word anything else but
a form of the Beautiful, I have carried
over that article of creed from the decks
of ships to the more circumscribed space
of my desk ; and by that act, I sup-
pose, I have become permanently imperfect
in the eyes of the ineffable company of pure
esthetes.

As in political so in literary action a
man wins friends for himself mostly by
the passion of his prejudices and by the
consistent narrowness of his outlook. But
I have never been able to love what was not
lovable or hate what was not hateful, out
of deference for some general principle.
Wliether there be any courage in making
this admission I know not. After the middle
turn of life's way we consider dangers and
joys with a tranquil mind. So I proceed
in peace to declare that I have always
suspected in the effort to bring into play
the extremities of emotions the debasing
touch of insincerity. In order to move others
deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves

B 17

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to be carried away beyond the bounds of
our normal sensibility — innocently enough
perhaps and of necessity, like an actor
who raises his voice on the stage above
the pitch of natural conversation — but still
we have to do that. And surely this is no
great sin. But the danger lies in the writer
becoming the victim of his own exaggera-
tion, losing the exact notion of sincerity,
and in the end coming to despise truth
itself as something too cold, too blunt for
his purpose — as, in fact, not good enough
for his insistent emotion. From laughter and
tears the descent is easy to snivelling and
giggles."^

These may seem selfish considerations ;
but you can't, in sound morals, condemn
a man for taking care of his own integrity.
It is his clear duty. And least of all you
can condemn an artist pursuing, however
humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim.
^, In that interior world where his thought
and his emotions go seeking for the experi-
ence of imagined adventures, there are no
policemen, no law, no pressure of circum-
stance or dread of opinion to keep him
within bounds. Who then is going to say
Nay to his temptations if not his conscience ?
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And besides — this, remember, is tlie place
and the moment of perfectly open talk — -
I think that all ambitions are lawful except
those which climb upwards on the miseries
or credulities of mankind. All intellectual
and artistic ambitions are permissible, up
to and even beyond the limit of prudent
sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are
mad, then so much the worse for the artist.
Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such ambitions
are their own reward. Is it such a very mad
presumption to believe in the sovereign power
of one's art, to try for other means, for
other ways of affirming this belief in the
deeper appeal of one's work ? To try to go
deeper is not to be insensible. An historian
of hearts is not an historian of emotions, yet
he penetrates further, restrained as he may
be, since his aim is to reach the very fount
of laughter and tears. The sight of human
affairs deserves admiration and pity. They
are worthy of respect too. And he is not
insensible who pays them the undemo i-
strative tribute of a sigh which is not a
sob, and of a smile which is not a grin.
Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but
resignation open-eyed, conscious and in-
formed by love, is the only one of our

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V

feelings for which it is impossible to become
a sham.

Not that I think resignation the last
word of wisdom. I am too much the creature
of my time for that. But I think that the
proper wisdom is to will what the gods
will without perhaps being certain what
their will is — or even if they have a will
of their own. And in this matter of life and
art it is not the Why that matters so much
to our happiness as the How. As the
Frenchman said, " II y a toujour s la maniere.^^
Very true. Yes. There is the manner. The
manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in
indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments
■ — and even in love. The manner in which,
as in the features and character of a human
face, the inner truth is foreshadowed for
those who know how to look at their kind.,;

Those who read me know my conviction
that the world, the temporal world, rests
on a few very simple ideas ; so simple that
they must be as old as the hills. It rests
notably, amongst others, on the idea of
Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is
not revolutionary in some way or other
can expect to attract much attention I have
not been revolutionary in my writings.
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The revolutionary spirit is mighty con-
venient in this, that it frees one from all
scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute
optimism is repulsive to my mind by the
menace of fanaticism and intolerance it con-
tains. No doubt one should smile at these
things ; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better
Philosopher. All claim to special righteous-
ness awakens in me that scorn and anger
from which a philosophical mind should be
free. . . .

I fear that trying to be conversational
I have only managed to be unduly dis-
cursive. I have never been very well
acquainted with the art of conversation —
that art which, I understand, is supposed
to be lost now. My young days, the days
when one's habits and character are formed,
have been rather familiar with long silences.
Such voices as broke into them were any-
thing but conversational. No. I haven't
got the habit. Yet this discursiveness is
not so irrelevant to the handful of pages
which follow. They, too, have been charged
with discursiveness, with disregard of
chronological order (which is in itself
a crime), with unconventionality of form
(which is an impropriety). I was told

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severely that the pubHc would view with
displeasure the informal character of my
recollections. " Alas ! " I protested mildly.
"Could I begin with the sacramental
words, 'I was born on such a date in
such a place ' ? The remoteness of the
locality would have robbed the statement
of all interest. I haven't lived through
wonderful adventures to be related seriatim.
I haven't known distinguished men on
whom I could pass fatuous remarks. I
haven't been mixed up with great or
scandalous affairs. This is but a bit
of psychological document, and even so,
I haven't written it with a view to put
forward any conclusion of my own."

But my objector was not placated. These
were good reasons for not writing at all —
not a defence of what stood written already,
he said.

I admit that almost anything, any-
thing in the world, would serve as a good
reason for not writing at all. But since
I have written them, all I want to say in
their defence is that these memories put down
without any regard for established conven-
tions have not been thrown off without
system and purpose. They have their hope

A FAMILIAR PREFACE

and their aim. The hope that from the
reading of these pages there may emerge
at last the vision of a personality ; the
man behind the books so fundamentally
dissimilar as, for instance, "Almayer's Folly "
and "The Secret Agent" — and yet a coherent,
justifiable personality both in its origin
and in its action. This is the hope. The
immediate aim, closely associated with
the hope, is to give the record of personal
memories by presenting faithfully the
feelings and sensations connected with the
writing of my first book and with my first
contact with the sea.

In the purposely mingled resonance of
this double strain a friend here and there
will perhaps detect a subtle accord.

J. C K,

23

Books may be written in all sorts of places.
Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a
mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a
river in the middle of a town ; and since
saints are supposed to look benignantly on
humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant
fancy that the shade of old Flaubert — who
imagined himself to be (amongst other things)
a descendant of Vikings — might have ho-
vered with amused interest over the decks
of a 2000-ton steamer called the Adowa, on
board of which, gripped by the inclement
winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth
chapter of " Almayer's Folly " was begun.
With interest, I say, for was not the kind
Norman giant with enormous moustaches
and a thundering voice the last of the
Romantics ? Was he not, in his unworldly,
almost ascetic, devotion to his art a sort of
literary, saint-like hermit ?

" ' /i^ has set at last,^ said Nina to her
mother, pointing to the hills behind which the
sun had sunk.^' . . . These words of

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SOME REMINISCENCES

Almayer's romantic daughter I remember
tracing on the grey paper of a pad which
rested on the blanket of my bed-place.
They referred to a sunset in Malayan
Isles and shaped themselves in my mind,
in a hallucinated vision of forests and
rivers and seas, far removed from a com-
mercial and yet romantic town of the
northern hemisphere. But at that moment
the mood of visions and words was cut
short by the third officer, a cheerful and
casual youth, coming in with a bang of the
door and the exclamation : " You've made
it jolly warm in here."

It was warm. I had turned on the steam-
heater after placing a tin under the leaky
water-cock — for perhaps you do not know
that water will leak where steam will not.
I am not aware of what my young friend
had been doing on deck all that morning, but
the hands he rubbed together vigorously were
very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling
by their mere aspect. He has remained the
only ban joist of my acquaintance, and being
also a younger son of a retired colonel, the
poem of Mr. Kipling, by a strange aberration
of associated ideas, always seems to me to
have been written with an exclusive view
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SOME REMINISCENCES

to his person. When he did not play the
banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He pro-
ceeded to this sentimental inspection and
after meditating a while over the strings
under my silent scrutiny inquired airily :

" What are you always scribbling there,
if it's fair to ask ? "

It was a fair enough question, but I did
not answer him, and simply turned the pad
over with a movement of instinctive secrecy :
I could not have told him he had put
to flight the psychology of Nina Almayer,
her opening speech of the tenth chapter
and the words of Mrs. Almayer 's wisdom
which were to follow in the ominous on-
coming of a tropical night. I could not have
told him that Nina had said : "It has set
at last." He would have been extremely
surprised and perhaps have dropped his
precious banjo. Neither could I have told
him that the sun of my sea-going was setting
too, even as I wrote the words expressing
the impatience of passionate youth bent on
its desire. I did not know this myself, and
it is safe to say he would not have cared,
though he was an excellent young fellow and
treated me with more deference than, in our
relative positions, I was strictly entitled to.

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SOME REMINISCENCES

He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo
and I went on looking through the port-hole.
The round opening framed in its brass rim
a fragment of the quays, with a row of
casks ranged on the frozen ground and the
tail-end of a great cart. A red-nosed carter
in a blouse and a woollen nightcap leaned
against the wheel. An idle, strolling custom-
house guard, belted over his blue capote^
had the air of being depressed by exposure
to the weather and the monotony of official
existence. The background of grimy houses
found a place in the picture framed by my
port-hole, across a wide stretch of paved
quay brown with frozen mud. The colour-
ing was sombre, and the most conspicuous
feature was a little cafe with curtained
windows and a shabby front of white wood-
work, corresponding with the squalor of
these poorer quarters bordering the river.
We had been shifted down there from
another berth in the neighbourhood of the
Opera House, where that same port-hole
gave me a view of quite another sort of
cafe — the best in the town, I believe, and
the very one where the worthy Bovary and
his wife, the romantic daughter of old Pere
Renault, had some refreshment after the
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SOME REMINISCENCES

memorable performance of an opera which
was the tragic story of Lucia di Lammer-
moor in a setting of light music.

I could recall no more the hallucination
of the Eastern Archipelago which I certainly
hoped to see again. The story of " Almayer's
Folly " got put away under the pillow for
that day. I do not know that I had any
occupation to keep me away from it ; the
truth of the matter is that on board that
ship we were leading just then a contempla-
tive life. I will not say anything of my
privileged position. I was there " just to
oblige," as an actor of standing may take
a small part in the benefit performance of a
friend.

As far as my feelings were concerned I
did not wish to be in that steamer at that
time and in those circumstances. And per-
haps I was not even wanted there in the usual
sense in which a ship " wants " an officer.
It was the first and last instance in my sea
life when I served ship-owners who have
remained completely shadowy to my appre-
hension. I do not mean this for the well-
known firm of London ship-brokers which
had chartered the ship to the, I will not say
short-lived, but ephemeral Franco-Canadian

29

SOME REMINISCENCES

Transport Company. A death leaves some-
thing behind, but there was never anything
tangible left from the F.C.T.C. It flourished
no longer than roses live, and unlike the
roses it blossomed in the dead of winter,
emitted a sort of faint perfume of adventure
and died before spring set in. But indubit-
ably it was a company, it had even a house-
flag, all white with the letters F.C.T.C.
artfully tangled up in a complicated mono-
gram. We flew it at our main-mast head,
and now I have come to the conclusion that
it was the only flag of its kind in existence.
All the same we on board, for many days,
had the impression of being a unit of a large
fleet with fortnightly departures for Mont-
real and Quebec as advertised in pamphlets
and prospectuses which came aboard in a
large package in Victoria Dock, London,
just before we started for Rouen, France.
And in the shadowy Ufe of the F.C.T.C. Ues
the secret of that, my last employment in
my calling, which in a remote sense inter-
rupted the rhythmical development of Nina
Almayer's story.

The then secretary of the London Ship-
masters' Society, with its modest rooms in
Fenchurch Street, was a man of indefatigable
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SOME REMINISCENCES

activity and the greatest devotion to his
task. He is responsible for what was my
last association with a ship. I call it that
because it can hardly be called a sea-going
experience. Dear Captain Frond — it is im-
possible not to pay him the tribute of
affectionate familiarity at this distance of
years — had very sound views as to the
advancement of knowledge and status for
the whole body of the officers of the mercan-
tile marine. He organised for us courses of
professional lectures, St. John ambulance
classes, corresponded industriously with pub-
lic bodies and members of Parliament on
subjects touching the interests of the service ;
and as to the oncoming of some inquiry or
commission relating to matters of the sea
and to the work of seamen, it was a perfect
godsend to his need of exerting himself on
our corporate behalf. Together with this
high sense of his official duties he had in
him a vein of personal kindness, a strong
disposition to do what good he could to the
individual members of that craft of which
in his time he had been a very excellent
master. And what greater kindness can one
do to a seaman than to put him in the way
of emplovment ? Captain Froud did not see

31

SOME REMINISCENCES

why the Shipmasters' Society, besides its
general guardianship of our interests, should
not be unofficially an employment agency of
the very highest class.

" I am trying to persuade all our great
ship -owning firms to come to us for their
men. There is nothing of a trade-union
spirit about our society, and I really don't
see why they should not," he said once to
me. " I am always telling the captains,
too, that all things being equal they ought
to give preference to the members of the
society. In my position I can generally find
for them what they want amongst our mem-
bers or our associate members."

In my wanderings about London from
West to East and back again (I was very
idle then) the two little rooms in Fenchurch
Street were a sort of resting-place where my
spirit, hankering after the sea, could feel
itself nearer to the ships, the men, and the
life of its choice — nearer there than on any
other spot of the solid earth. This resting-
place used to be, at about five o'clock in
the afternoon, full of men and tobacco smoke,
but Captain Froud had the smaller room to
himself and there he granted private inter-
views, whose principal motive was to render
32

SOME REMINISCENCES

service. Thus, one murky November after-
noon he beckoned me in with a crooked
finger and that pecuHar glance above his
spectacles which is perhaps my strongest
physical recollection of the man.

" I have had in here a shipmaster, this
morning," he said, getting back to his desk
and motioning me to a chair, " who is in want
of an officer. It's for a steamship. You know,
nothing pleases me more than to be asked,
but unfortunately I do not quite see my
way ..."

As the outer room was full of men I cast
a wondering glance at the closed door but
he shook his head.

" Oh, yes, I should be only too glad to
get that berth for one of them. But the
fact of the matter is, the captain of that
ship wants an officer who can speak French
fluently, and that's not so easy to find.
I do not know anybody myself but you.
It's a second officer's berth and, of
course, you would not care . . . would
you now ? I know that it isn't what you
are looking for."

It was not. I had given myself up to the
idleness of (a haunted man who looks for
nothing but words wherein to capture his

C 33

SOME REMINISCENCES

visions. But I admit that outwardly I
resembled sufficiently a man who could make
a second officer for a steamer chartered by
a French company. I showed no sign of
being haunted by the fate of Nina and by
the murmurs of tropical forests ; and even
my intimate intercourse with Almayer (a
person of weak character) had not put a
visible mark upon my features. For many
years he and the world of his story had been
the companions of my imagination without,
I hope, impairing my ability to deal with the
realities of sea life. I had had the man and
his surroundings with me ever since my
return from the eastern waters, some four
years before the day of which I speak.

It was in the front sitting-room of fur-
nished apartments in a Pimlico square that
they first began to live again with a vividness
and poignancy quite foreign to our former
real intercourse. I had been treating myself
to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity
of occupying my mornings, Almayer (that
old acquaintance) came nobl}^ to the rescue.
Before long, as was only proper, his wife
and daughter joined him round my table
and then the rest of that Pantai band came
full of words and gestures. Unknown to my
34

SOME REMINISCENCES

respectable landlady, it was my practice
directly after my breakfast to hold animated
receptions of Malays, Arabs and half-castes.
They did not clamour aloud for my attention.
They came with a silent and irresistible
appeal — and the appeal, I affirm here, was
not to my self-love or my vanity. It seems"?
now to have had a moral character, for why
should the memory of these beings, seen in
their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand
to express itself in the shape of a novel,
except on the ground of that mysterious
fellowship which unites in a community
of hopes and fears all the dwellers on this
earth ? ~

I did not receive my visitors with boister-
ous rapture as the bearers of any gifts of
profit or fame. There was no vision of a
printed book before me as I sat writing at
that table, situated in a decayed part of
Belgravia. After all these years, each
leaving its evidence of slowly blackened
pages, I can honestly say that it is a senti-
ment akin to piety which prompted me to
render in words assembled with conscien-
tious care the memory of things far distant ,
and of men who had lived.

But, coming back to Captain Froud and

35

SOME REMINISCENCES

his fixed idea of never disappointing ship-
owners or ship-captains, it was not Hkely
that I should fail him in his ambition — to
satisfy at a few hours' notice the unusual
demand for a French-speaking officer. He
explained to me that the ship was chartered
by a French company intending to establish
a regular monthly line of sailings from
Rouen, for the transport of French emigrants
to Canada. But, frankly, this sort of thing
did not interest me very much. I said gravely
that if it were really a matter of keeping up
the reputation of the Shipmasters' Society,
I would consider it. But the consideration
was just for form's sake. The next day I
interviewed the Captain, and I believe we
were impressed favourably with each other.
He explained that his chief mate was
an excellent man in every respect and
that he could not think of dismissing him
so as to give me the higher position ; but
that if I consented to come as second
officer I would be given certain special
advantages — and so on.

I told him that if I came at all the rank
really did not matter.

" I am sure," he insisted, " you will get
on first rate with Mr. Paramor,"
36

SOME REMINISCENCES

I promised faithfully to stay for two trips
at least, and it was in those circumstances
that what was to be my last connection with
a ship began. And after all there was not
even one single trip. It may be that it was
simply the fulfilment of a fate, of that
written word on my forehead which appa-
rently forbade me, through all my sea wan-
derings, ever to achieve the crossing of
the Western Ocean — using the words in
that special sense in which sailors speak
of Western Ocean trade, of Western Ocean
packets, of Western Ocean hard cases.
The new life attended closely upon the old
and the nine chapters of " Almayer's Folly "
went with me to the Victoria Dock, whence
in a few days we started for Rouen. I won't
go so far as saying that the engaging of a
man fated never to cross the Western Ocean
was the absolute cause of the Franco-
Canadian Transport Company's failure to
achieve even a single passage. It might have
been that of course ; but the obvious, gross
obstacle was clearly the want of money.
Four hundred and sixty bunks for emigrants
were put together in the 'tween decks by
industrious carpenters while we lay in the
Victoria Dock, but never an emigrant

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SOME REMINISCENCES

turned up in Rouen — of which, being a
humane person, I confess I was glad. Some
gentlemen from Paris — I think there were
three of them, and one was said to be the
Chairman — turned up indeed and went from
end to end of the ship, knocking their silk
hats cruelly against the deck -beams. I
attended them personally, and I can vouch
for it that the interest they took in things
was intelligent enough, though, obviously,
they had never seen anything of the sort
before. Their faces as they went ashore wore a
cheerfully inconclusive expression. Notwith-
standing that this inspecting ceremony was
supposed to be a preliminary to immediate
sailing, it was then, as they filed down our
gangway, that I received the inward
monition that no sailing within the meaning
of our charter-party would ever take place.

It must be said that in less than three
weeks a move took place. When we first
arrived we had been taken up with much
ceremony well towards the centre of the
town, and, all the street corners being
placarded with the tricolour posters an-
nouncing the birth of our company, the
petit bourgeois with his wife and family
made a Sunday holiday from the inspection
38

SOME REMINISCENCES

of the ship. I was always in evidence in my
best uniform to give information as though
I had been a Cook's tourists' interpreter,
while our quarter-masters reaped a harvest
of small change from personally conducted
parties. But when the move was made —
that move which carried us some mile and a
half down the stream to be tied up to an
altogether muddier and shabbier quay —
then indeed the desolation of solitude became
our lot. It was a complete and soundless
stagnation ; for, as we had the ship ready for
sea to the smallest detail, as the frost was
hard and the days short, we were absolutely
idle — idle to the point of blushing with shame
when the thought struck us that all the time
our salaries went on. Young Cole was ag-
grieved because, as he said, we could not
enjoy any sort of fun in the evening after
loafing like this all day : even the banjo
lost its charm since there was nothing to
prevent his strumming on it all the time
between the meals. The good Paramor — he
was really a most excellent fellow — became
unhappy as far as was possible to his cheery
nature, till one dreary day I suggested, out
of sheer mischief, that he should employ the
dormant energies of the crew in hauling

39

SOME REMINISCENCES

both cables up on deck and turning them
end for end.

For a moment Mr. Paramor was radiant.
" Excellent idea ! " but directly his face
fell. " Wliy . . . Yes ! But we can't make
that job last more than three days," he
muttered discontentedly. I don't know how
long he expected us to be stuck on the river-
side outskirts of Rouen, but I know that
the cables got hauled up and turned end
for end according to my satanic suggestion,
put down again, and their very existence
utterly forgotten, I believe, before a French
river pilot came on board to take our ship
down, empty as she came, into the Havre
roads. You may think that this state of
forced idleness favoured some advance in
the fortunes of Almayer and his daughter.
Yet it was not so. As if it were some sort
of evil spell, my banjoist cabin-mate's inter-
ruption, as related above, had arrested them
short at the point of that fateful sunset
for many weeks together. It was always thus
with this book, begun in '89 and finished
in '94 — with that shortest of all the novels
which it was to be my lot to write. Between
its opening exclamation calling Almayer to
his dinner in his wife's voice and Abdullah's
40

SOME REMINISCENCES

(his enemy) mental reference to the God
of Islam — " The Merciful, the Compassion-
ate " — which closes the book, there were to
come several long sea passages, a visit (to
use the elevated phraseology suitable to the
occasion) to the scenes (some of them) of
my childhood and the realisation of child-
hood's vain words, expressing a light-hearted
and romantic whim.

It was in 1868, when nine years old or
thereabouts, that while looking at a map of
Africa of the time and putting my finger
on the blank space then representing the
unsolved mystery of that continent, I said
to myself with absolute assurance and an
amazing audacity which are no longer in my
character now :

" When I grow up I shall go there.'^''
And of course I thought no more about it
till after a quarter of a century or so an
opportunity offered to go there — as if the
sin of childish audacity were to be visited
on my mature head. Yes. I did go there :
there being the region of Stanley Falls which
in '68 was the blankest of blank spaces on
the earth's figured surface. And the MS. of
" Almayer's Folly," carried about me as if
it were a talisman or a treasure, went there

41

SOME REMINISCENCES

too. That it ever came out of there seems a
special dispensation of Providence ; because
a good many of my other properties, infin-
itelv more valuable and useful to me,
remained behind through unfortunate acci-
dents of transportation. I call to mind,
for instance, a specially awkward turn of
the Congo between Kinchassa and Leopolds-
ville — more particularly when one had to
take it at night in a big canoe with only
half the proper number of paddlers. I failed
in being the second white man on record
drowned at that interesting spot through the
upsetting of a canoe. The first was a young
Belgian officer, but the accident happened
some months before my time, and he, too,
I believe, was going home ; not perhaps
quite so ill as myself — but still he was going
home. I got round the turn more or less
alive, though I was too sick to care whether
I did or not, and, always with " Almayer's
Folly " amongst my diminishing baggage, I
arrived at that delectable capital Boma,
where before the departure of the steamer
which was to take me home I had the time
to wish myself dead over and over again
with perfect sincerity. At that date there
Avere in existence only seven chapters of
42

SOME REMINISCENCES

'* Almayer's Folly," but the chapter in my
history which followed was that of a long,
long illness and very dismal convalescence.
Geneva, or more precisely the hydropathic
establishment of Champel, is rendered for
ever famous by the termination of the eighth
chapter in the history of Almayer's decline
and fall. The events of the ninth are in-
extricably mixed up with the details of the
proper management of a waterside ware-
house owned by a certain city firm whose
name does not matter. But that work,
undertaken to accustom myself again to the
activities of a healthy existence, soon came
to an end. The earth had nothing to hold
me with for very long. And then that
memorable story, like a cask of choice
Madeira, got carried for three years to and
fro upon the sea. Whether this treatment
improved its flavour or not, of course I
would not like to say. As far as appearance
is concerned it certainly did nothing of the
kind. The whole MS. acquired a faded look
and an ancient, yellowish complexion. It
became at last unreasonable to suppose
that anything in the world would ever
happen to Almayer and Nina. And yet
something most unlikely to happen on the

43

SOME REMINISCENCES

high seas was to wake them up from their
state of suspended animation.

What is it that Novahs says ? " It is
certain my conviction gains infinitely the
moment another soul will believe in it."
And[ what is a novel if not a conviction of
our fellow-men's existence strong enough to
take upon itself a form of imagined life
clearer than reality and whose accumulated
verisimihtude of selected episodes puts to
shame the pride of documentary history?]
Providence which saved my MS. from the
Congo rapids brought it to the knowledge
of a helpful soul far out on the open sea.
It would be on my part the greatest in-
gratitude ever to forget the sallow, sunken
face and the deep-set, dark eyes of the young
Cambridge man (he was a " passenger for
his health " on board the good ship Torrens
outward bound to Australia) who was the
first reader of " Alm.ayer's Folly " — the very
first reader I ever had. " Would it bore you
very much reading a MS. in a handwriting
like mine ? " I asked him one evening on
a sudden impulse at the end of a longish
conversation whose subject was Gibbon's
History. Jacques (that was his name) was
sitting in my cabin one stormy dog-watch
44

SOME REMINISCENCES

below, after bringing me a book to read
from his own travelling store.

" Not at all," he answered with his courte-
ous intonation and a faint smile. As I pulled
a drawer open his suddenly aroused curiosity
gave him a watchful expression. I wonder
what he expected to see. A poem, maybe.
All that's beyond guessing now. He was not
a cold but a calm man, still more subdued
by disease — a man of few words and of an
unassuming modesty in general intercourse,
but with something uncommon in the whole
of his person which set him apart from the
undistinguished lot of our sixty passengers.
His eyes had a thoughtful introspective
look. In his attractive reserved manner,
and in a veiled sympathetic voice he
asked :

'' What is this ? " " It is a sort of tale,"
I answered with an effort. " It is not even
finished yet. Nevertheless I would like to
know what you think of it." He put the
MS. in the breast-pocket of his jacket ; I
remember perfectly his thin brown fingers
folding it lengthwise. " I will read it to-
morrow," he remarked, seizing the door-
handle, and then, watching the roll of the
ship for a propitious moment, he opened the

45

SOME REMINISCENCES

door and was gone. In the moment of his
exit I heard the sustained booming of the
wind, the swish of the water on the decks
of the Torrens, and the subdued, as if
distant, roar of the rising sea. I noted the
growing disquiet in the great restlessness of
the ocean, and responded professionally to
it with the thought that at eight o'clock,
in another half-hour or so at the furthest,
the top-gallant sails would have to come off
the ship.

Next day, but this time in the first dog-
watch, Jacques entered my cabin. He had a
thick, woollen muffler round his throat and
the MS. was in his hand. He tendered it
to me with a steady look but without a
word. I took it in silence. He sat down
on the couch and still said nothing. I
opened and shut a drawer under my desk,
on which a filled-up log-slate lay wide open
in its wooden frame waiting to be copied
neatly into the sort of book I was accustomed
to write with care, the ship's log-book. I
turned my back squarely on the desk. And
even then Jacques never offered a word.
" Well, what do you say ? " I asked at last.
" Is it worth finishing ? " This question
expressed exactly the whole of my thoughts.
46

SOME REMINISCENCES

" Distinctly," he answered in his sedate,
veiled voice and then coughed a little.

" Were you interested ? " I inquired fur-
ther almost in a whisper.

" Very much ! "

In a pause I went on meeting instinctively
the heavy rolling of the ship, and Jacques
put his feet upon the couch. The curtain of
my bed-place swung to and fro as it were a
punkah, the bulkhead lamp circled in its
gimbals, and now and then the cabin door
rattled slightly in the gusts of wind. It
was in latitude 40 south, and nearly in the
longitude of Greenwich, as far as I can
remember, that these quiet rites of Almayer's
and Nina's resurrection were taking place.
In the prolonged silence it occurred to me
that there was a good deal of retrospective
writing in the story as far as it went. Was
it intelligible in its action, I asked myself,
as if already the story-teller were being
born into the body of a seamaa. But I heard
on deck the whistle of the officer of the watch
and remained on the alert to catch the order
that was to follow this call to attention.
It reached me as a faint, fierce shout to
'' Square the yards." " Aha ! " I thought to
myself, " a westerly blow coming on." Then

47

SOME REMINISCENCES

I turned to my very first reader who, alas !
was not to live long enough to know the
end of the tale.

" Now let me ask you one more thing :
is the story quite clear to you as it
stands ? "

He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my
face and seemed surprised.

"Yes! Perfectly."

This was all I was to hear from his lips
concerning the merits of " Almayer's Folly."
We never spoke together of the book again.
A long period of bad weather set in and I
had no thoughts left but for my duties,
whilst poor Jacques caught a fatal cold
and had to keep close in his cabin. When
we arrived in Adelaide the first reader of
my prose went at once up-country, and
died rather suddenly in the end, either in
Australia or it may be on the passage while
going home through the Suez Canal. I
am not sure which it was now, and I do not
think I ever heard precisely ; though I
made inquiries about him from some of our
return passengers who, wandering about to
" see the country " during the ship's stay
in port, had come upon him here and there.
At last we sailed, homeward bound, and
48

SOME REMINISCENCES

still not one line was added to the careless
scrawl of the many pages which poor
Jacques had had the patience to read with
the very shadows of Eternity gathering
already in the hollows of his kind, steadfast
eyes.

The purpose instilled into me by his
simple and final " Distinctly " remained
dormant, yet alive to await its opportunity,
a dare say I am compelled, unconsciously
compelled, now to write volume after volume,
as in past years I was compelled to go
to sea voyage after voyage. Leaves must
follow upon each other as leagues used to
follow in the days gone by, on and on to
the appointed end, which, being Truth itself,
is One — one for all men and for all occupa-
tions.

I do not know which of the two impulses
has appeared more mysterious and more
wonderful to me. Still, in writing, as in
going to sea, I had to wait my opportunity.
Let me confess here that I was never one
of those wonderful fellows that would go
afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the fun,
and if I may pride myself upon my consis-
tency, it was ever just the same with my
writing. Some men, I have heard, write in

D 49

SOME REMINISCENCES

railway carriages, and could do it, perhaps,
sitting cross-legged on a clothes-line ; but
I must confess that my sybaritic disposition
will not consent to write without something
at least resembling a chair. Line by line,
rather than page by page, was the growth
of " Almayer's Folly."

And so it happened that I very nearly
lost the MS., advanced now to the first
words of the ninth chapter, in the Friedrich-
strasse railway station (that's in Berlin, you
know), on my way to Poland, or more
precisely to Ukraine. On an early, sleepy
morning changing trains in a hurry I left
my Gladstone bag in a refreshment-room.
A worthy and intelligent Kojfertrdger rescued
it. Yet in my anxiety I was not thinking
of the MS. but of all the other things that
were packed in the bag.

In Warsaw, where I spent two days,
those wandering pages were never exposed
to the light, except once, to candle-light,
while the bag lay open on a chair. I was
dressing hurriedly to dine at a sporting club.
A friend of my childhood (he had been in
the Diplomatic Service, but had turned to
growing wheat on paternal acres, and we
had not seen each other for over twenty
50

SOME REMINISCENCES

years) was sitting on the hotel sofa waiting
to carry me off there.

" You might tell me something of yom* life
while you are dressing," he suggested kindly.

I do not think I told him much of my
life-story either then or later. The talk of
the select little party with which he made me
dine was extremely animated and embraced
most subjects under heaven, from big-game
shooting in Africa to the last poem pub-
lished in a very modernist review, edited
by the very young and patronised by the
highest society. But it never touched upon
" Almayer's Folly," and next morning, in
uninterrupted obscurity, this inseparable
companion went on rolling with me in the
south-east direction towards the Govern-
ment of Kiev.

At that time there was an eight-hours'
drive, if not more, from the railway station
to the country house which was my destina-
tion.

" Dear boy " (these words were always
written in English), so ran the last letter from
that house received in London, — " Get your-
self driven to the only inn in the place, dine
as well as you can, and some time in the
evening my own confidential servant, facto-

31

SOME REMINISCENCES

turn and major-domo, a Mr. V. S. (I warn you
he is of noble extraction), will present him-
self before you, reporting the arrival of the
small sledge which will take you here on
the next day. I send with him my heaviest
fur, which I suppose with such overcoats
as you may have with you will keep you
from freezing on the road."

Sure CQOUgh, as I was dining, served by
a Hebrew waiter, in an enormous barn-like
bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the
door opened and, in a travelling costume of
long boots, big sheep-skin cap and a short
coat girt with a leather belt, the Mr. V. S.
(of noble extraction), a man of about thirty-
five, appeared with an air of perplexity on
his open and moustachioed countenance. I
got up from the table and greeted him in
Polish, with, I hope, the right shade of
consideration demanded by his noble blood
and his confidential position. His face
cleared up in a wonderful way. It appeared
that, notwithstanding my uncle's earnest
assurances, the good fellow had remained
in doubt of our understanding each other.
He imagined I would talk to him in some
foreign language. I was told that his last
words on getting into the sledge to come
52

SOME REMINISCENCES

to meet me shaped an anxious exclama-
tion :

" Well ! Well ! Here I am going, but
God only knows how I am to make myself
understood to our master's nephew."

We understood each other very well from
the first. He took charge of me as if I
were not quite of age. I had a delightful
boyish feeling of coming home from school
when he muffled me up next morning in
an enormous bear-skin travelling-coat and
took his seat protectively by my side. The
sledge was a very small one and it looked
utterly insignificant, almost like a toy behind
the four big bays harnessed two and two.
We three, counting the coachman, filled it
completely. He was a youag fellow with
clear blue eyes ; the high collar of his livery
fur coat framed his cheery countenance and
stood all round level with the top of his head.

" Now, Joseph," my companion addressed
him, " do you think we shall manage to get
home before six ? " His answer was that
we would surely, with God's help, and pro-
viding there were no heavy drifts in the
long stretch between certain villages whose
names came with an extremely famihar
sound to my ears. He turned out an

53

SOME REMINISCENCES

excellent coachman with an instinct for keep-
ing the road amongst the snow-covered fields
and a natural gift of getting the best out
of his horses.

" He is the son of that Joseph that I
suppose the Captain remembers. He who used
to drive the Captain's late grandmother of
holy memory," remarked V. S. busy tucking
fur rugs about my feet.

I remembered perfectly the trusty Joseph
who used to drive my grandmother. Why !
he it was who let me hold the reins for the
first time in my life and allowed me to
play with the great four-in-hand whip out-
side the doors of the coach-house.

" What became of him ? " I asked. " He
is no longer serving, I suppose."

" He served our master," was the reply.
" But he died of cholera ten years ago
now — that great epidemic we had. And
his wife died at the same time — the whole
houseful of them, and this is the only boy
that was left."

The MS. of " Almayer's Folly " was re-
posing in the bag under our feet.

I saw again the sun setting on the plains
as I saw it in the travels of my childhood.
It set, clear and red, dipping into the
54

SOME REMINISCENCES

snow in full view as if it were setting on the
sea. It was twenty-three years since I
had seen the sun set over that land ; and
we drove on in the darkness which fell
swiftly upon the livid expanse of snows till,
out of the waste of a white earth joining a
bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the
clumps of trees about a village of the
Ukrainian plain. A cottage or two glided
by, a low interminable wall and then, glim-
mering and winking through a screen of fir-
trees, the lights of the master's house.

That very evening the wandering MS.
of " Almayer's Folly " was unpacked and
unostentatiously laid on the writing-table
in my room, the guest-room which had
been, I was informed in an affectedly careless
tone, awaiting me for some fifteen years
or so. It attracted no attention from the
affectionate presence hovering round the son
of the favourite sister.

" You won't have many hours to your-
self while you are staying with me, brother,"
he said — this form of address borrowed
from the speech of our peasants being the
usual expression of the highest good humour
in a moment of affectionate elation. " I
shall be always coming in for a chat."

55

SOME REMINISCENCES

As a matter of fact we had the whole
house to chat in, and were everlastingly
intruding upon each other. I invaded the
retirement of his study where the principal
feature was a colossal silver inkstand pre-
sented to him on his fiftieth year by a
subscription of all his wards then living.
He had been guardian of many orphans
of land-owning families from the three
southern provinces — ever since the year 1860.
Some of them had been my schoolfellows
and playmates, but not one of them, girls
or boys, that I know of has ever written a
novel. One or two were older than myself
— considerably older, too. One of them, a
visitor I remember in my early years, was
the man who first put me on horseback, and
his four-horse bachelor turn-out, his perfect
horsemanship and general skill in manly
exercises was one of my earliest admirations.
I seem to remember my mother looking on
from a colonnade in front of the dining-room
windows as I was lifted upon the pony,
held, for all I know, by the very Joseph —
the groom attached specially to my grand-
mother's service — who died of cholera. It
was certainly a young man in a dark blue,
tail -less coat and huge Cossack trousers, that
56

SOME REMINISCENCES

being the livery of the men about the stables.
It must have been in 1864, but reckoning
by another mode of calculating time, it
was certainly in the year in which my
mother obtained permission to travel south
and visit her family, from the exile into which
she had followed my father. For that, too,
she had had to ask permission, and I know
that one of the conditions of that favour
was that she should be treated exactly as
a condemned exile herself. Yet a couple of
years later, in memory of her eldest brother
who had served in the Guards and dying
early left hosts of friends and a loved memory
in the great world of St. Petersburg, some
influential personages procured for her this
permission — it was officially called the
"Highest Grace" — of a three months' leave
from exile.

This is also the year in which I first begin
to remember my mother with more distinct-
ness than a mere loving, wide-browed, silent,
protecting presence, whose eyes had a sort
of commanding sweetness ; and I also re-
member the great gathering of all the
relations from near and far, and the grey
heads of the family friends paying her the
homage of respect and love in the house of

57

SOME REMIXISCENTES

her favourite brother who, a few years
later, was to take the place for me of both
my parents.

I did not understand the tragic significance
of it all at the time, though indeed I remem-
ber that doctors also came. There were no
sifjns of invalidism about her — but I think
that already they had pronounced her doom
unless perhaps the change to a southern
climate could re-establish her declining
strength. For me it seems the very happiest
period of my existence. There was my cousin,
a delightful quick-tempered little girl, some
months younger than myself, whose life,
lovincjlv watched over, as if she were a roval
princess, came to an end with her fifteenth
vear. There were other children, too, manv
of whom are dead now, and not a few whose
very names I have forgotten. Over all this
hung the oppressive shadow of the great
Russian Empire — the shadow lowering with
the darkness of a new-born national hatred
fostered b}' the Moscow school of journalists
against the Poles after the ill-omened rising
of 1863.

This is a far cry back from the MS. of
" Almayer's Folly," but the public record
of these formative impressions is not
58

SOME REMINISCENCES

the whim of an uneasy egotism. These,
too, are things human, already distant in
their appeal. It is meet that something
more should be left for the novelist's children
than the colours and figures of his own
hard-won creation. That which in their
grown-up years may appear to the world
about them as the most enigmatic side of
their natures and perhaps must remain
for ever obscure even to themselves, will be
their unconscious response to the still voice
of that inexorable past from which his work
of fiction and their personalities are re-
motely derived.

i Only in men's imagination does every truth
find an effective and undeniable existence.
Imagination, not invention, is the supreme
master of art as of life. An imaginative
and exact rendering of authentic memories
may serve worthily that spirit of piety
towards all things human which sanctions
the conceptions of a writer of tales, and
the emotions of the man reviewing his own
experience.

59

II

As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage
after a journey from London into Ukraine.
The MS. of " Almayer's Folly "—my com-
panion already for some three years or
more, and then in the ninth chapter of
its age — was deposited unostentatiously on
the writing-table placed between two win-
dows. It didn't occur to me to put it away
in the drawer the table was fitted with,
but my eye was attracted by the good form
of the same drawer's brass handles. Two
candelabra with four candles each lighted
up festally the room which had waited so
many years for the wandering nephew. The
blinds were down.

Within five hundred yards of the chair
on which I sat stood the first peasant hut
of the village — part of my maternal grand-
father's estate, the only part remaining in
the possession of a member of the family ;
and beyond the village in the limitless
blackness of a winter's night there lay the
great unfenced fields— not a flat and severe
60

SOME REMINISCENCES

plain, but a kindly bread-giving land of
low rounded ridges, all white now, with the
black patches of timber nestling in the
hollows. The road by which I had come ran
through the village with a turn just out-
side the gates closing the short drive.
Somebody was abroad on the deep snow-
track ; a quick tinkle of bells stole gradually
into the stillness of the room like a tuneful
whisper.

My unpacking had been watched over
by the servant who had come to help me,
and, for the most part, had been standing
attentive but unnecessary at the door of
the room. I did not want him in the
least, but I did not like to tell him to go
away. He was a young fellow, certainly
more than ten years younger than myself ;
I had not been — I won't say in that place
but within sixty miles of it, ever since the
year '67 ; yet his guileless physiognomy of
the open peasant type seemed strangely
familiar. It was quite possible that he might
have been a descendant, a son or even a
grandson, of the servants whose friendly
faces had been familiar to me in my early
childhood. As a matter of fact he had no
such claim on my consideration. He was

61

SOME REMINISCENCES

the product of some village near by and
was there on his promotion, having learned
the service in one or two houses as pantry-
boy. I know this because I asked the

worthy V next day. I might well have

spared the question. I discovered before
long that all the faces about the house
and all the faces in the village : the grave
faces with long moustaches of the heads of
families, the downy faces of the young men,
the faces of the little fair-haired children,
the handsome, tanned, wide-browed faces
of the mothers seen at the doors of the huts
were as familiar to me as though I had
known them all from childhood, and my
childhood were a matter of the day before
yesterday.

The tinkle of the traveller's bells, after
growing louder, had faded away quickly,
and the tumult of barking dogs in the
village had calmed down at last. My
uncle, lounging in the corner of a small
couch, smoked his long Turkish chibouk in
silence.

" This is an extremely nice writing-table
you have got for my room," I remarked.

"It is really your property," he said,
keeping his eyes on me, with an interested
62

SOME REMINISCENCES

and wistful expression as he had done ever
since I had entered the house. " Forty
years ago your mother used to write at this
very table. In our house in Oratow it
stood in the little sitting-room which, by
a tacit arrangement, was given up to the
girls — I mean to your mother and her
sister who died so young. It was a present
to them jointly from our uncle Nicholas B.
when your mother was seventeen and your
aunt tw^o years younger. She was a very
dear, delightful girl, that aunt of yours,
of whom I suppose you know nothing more
than the name. She did not shine so much
by personal beauty and a cultivated mind,
in which your mother was far superior.
It was her good sense, the admirable sweet-
ness of her nature, her exceptional facility
and ease in daily relations that endeared
her to everybody. Her death was a terrible
grief and a serious moral loss for us all.
Had she lived she would have brought the
greatest blessings to the house it would
have been her lot to enter, as wife, mother
and mistress of a household. She would
have created round herself an atmosphere
of peace and content which only those who
can love unselfishly are able to evoke.

63

SOME REMINISCENCES

Your mother — of far greater beauty, ex-
ceptionally distinguished in person, manner
and intellect — had a less easy disposition.
Being more brilliantly gifted she also ex-
pected more from life. At that trying time
especially, we were greatly concerned about
her state. Suffering in her health from
the shock of her father's death (she was
alone in the house with him when he died
suddenly), she was torn by the inward
struggle between her love for the man
whom she was to marry in the end and her
knowledge of her dead father's declared
objection to that match. Unable to bring
herself to disregard that cherished memory
and that judgment she had always respected
and trusted, and, on the other hand, feeling
the impossibility to resist a sentiment so
deep and so true, she could not have been
expected to preserve her mental and moral
balance. At war with herself, she could
not give to others that feeling of peace
which was not her own. It was only later,
when united at last with the man of her
choice that she developed those uncommon
gifts of mind and heart which compelled
the respect and admiration even of our
foes. Meeting with calm fortitude the cruel
64

SOME REMINISCENCES

trials of a life reflecting all the national and
social misfortunes of the community, she
realised the highest conceptions of duty as
a wife, a mother and a patriot, sharing
the exile of her husband and representing
nobly the ideal of Polish womanhood. Our
Uncle Nicholas was not a man very accessible
to feelings of affection. Apart from his
worship for Napoleon the Great, he loved
really, I believe, only three people in the
world : his mother — your great-grandmother,
whom you have seen but cannot possibly
remember ; his brother, our father, in whose
house he lived for so many years ; and of
all of us, his nephews and nieces grown
up round him, your mother alone. The
modest, lovable qualities of the youngest
sister he did not seem able to see. It
was I who felt most profoundly this un-
expected stroke of death falling upon the
family less than a year after I had become
its head. It was terribly unexpected. Driv-
ing home one wintry afternoon to keep me
company in our empty house, where I
had to remain permanently administering
the estate and attending to the complicated
affairs — (the girls took it in turn week and
week about)— driving, as I said, from the

E 65

SOME REMINISCENCES

house of the Countess Tekla Potocka, where
our invahd mother was staying then to be
near a doctor, they lost the road and got
stuck in a snowdrift. She was alone with
the coachman and old Valery, the personal
servant of our late father. Impatient of
delay while they w^ere trying to dig them-
selves out, she jumped out of the sledge
and went to look for the road herself.
All this happened in '51, not ten miles
from the house in which we are sitting now.
The road was soon found, but snow had
begun to fall thickly again, and they
were four more hours getting home.
Both the men took off their sheep-
skin-lined great-coats and used all their
own rugs to wrap her up against the
cold, notwithstanding her protests, posi-
tive orders and even struggles, as Valery
afterwards related to me. ' How could
I,' he remonstrated with her, ' go to
meet the blessed soul of my late master
if I let any harm come to you while there's
a spark of life left in my body ? ' When
they reached home at last the poor old man
was stiff and speechless from exposure, and
the coachman was in not much better plight,
though he had the strength to drive round
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SOME REMINISCENCES

to the stables himself. To my reproaches
for venturing out at all in such weather,
she answered characteristically that she
could not bear the thought of abandoning
me to my cheerless solitude. It is incom-
prehensible how it was that she was allowed
to start. I suppose it had to be ! She
made light of the cough which came on
next day, but shortly afterwards in-
flammation of the lungs set in, and in
three weeks she was no more ! She was
the first to be taken away of the young
generation under my care. Behold the
vanity of all hopes and fears ! I was the
most frail at birth of all the children.
For years I remained so delicate that
my parents had but little hope of bring-
ing me up ; and yet I have survived
five brothers and two sisters, and many
of my contemporaries ; I have outlived
my wife and daughter too — and from
all those who have had some knowledge
at least of these old times you alone
are left. It has been my lot to lay
in an early grave many honest hearts,
many brilliant promises, many hopes full
of life."

He got up brusquely, sighed, and left me,

67

SOME REMINISCENCES

saying : " We will dine in half an hour."
Without moving I listened to his quick
steps resounding on the waxed floor of the
next room, traversing the ante-room lined
with bookshelves, where he paused to put
his chibouk in the pipe-stand before passing
into the drawing-room (these were all en
suite), where he became inaudible on the
thick carpet. But I heard the door of his
study-bedroom close. He was then sixty-
two years old and had been for a quarter
of a century the wisest, the firmest, the
most indulgent of guardians, extending over
me a paternal care and affection, a moral
support which I seemed to feel always
near me in the most distant parts of the
earth.

As to Mr. Nicholas B., sub-lieutenant
of 1808, lieutenant of 1813 in the French
Army, and for a short time Officier d^Or-
donnance of Marshal Marmont ; afterwards
Captain in the 2nd Regiment of Mounted
Rifles in the Polish Army — such as it existed
up to 1830 in the reduced kingdom estab-
lished by the Congress of Vienna — I must
say that from all that more distant past,
known to me traditionally and a little de
visu, and called out by the words of the
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SOME REMINISCENCES

man just gone away, he remains the
most incomplete figure. It is obvious
that I must have seen him in '64, for
it is certain that he would not have
missed the opportunity of seeing my
mother for what he must have known
would be the last time. From my early
boyhood to this day, if I try to call
up his image, a sort of mist rises before
my eyes, a mist in which I perceive
vaguely only a neatly brushed head of
white hair (which is exceptional in the case
of the B. family, where it is the rule for
men to go bald in a becoming manner,
before thirty) and a thin, curved, dignified
nose, a feature in strict accordance with
the pliysical tradition of the B. family.
But it is not by these fragmentary remains
of perishable mortality that he lives in my
memory. I knew, at a very early age,
that my grand-uncle Nicholas B. was a
Knight of the Legion of Honour and that
he had also the Polish Cross for valour
Virtuti Militari. The knowledge of these
glorious facts inspired in me an admiring
veneration ; yet it is not that sentiment,
strong as it was, which resumes for me the
force and the significance of his personality.

69

SOME REMINISCENCES

It is overborne by another and com-
plex impression of awe, compassion and
horror. Mr. Nicholas B. remains for me
the unfortunate and miserable (but heroic)
being who once upon a time had eaten a
dog.

It is a good forty years since I heard
the tale, and the effect has not worn off
yet. I believe this is the very first, say,
realistic, story I heard in my life ; but all
the same I don't know why I should have
been so frightfully impressed. Of course I
know what our village dogs look like —
but still . . . No ! At this very day,
recalling the horror and compassion of my
childhood, I ask myself whether I am right
in disclosing to a cold and fastidious world
that awful episode in the family history.
I ask myself — is it right ? — especially as
the B. family had always been honourably
known in a wide country-side for the delicacy
of their tastes in the matter of eating and
drinking. But upon the \vliole, and con-
sidering that this gastronomical degradation
overtaking a gallant young officer lies really
at the door of the Great Napoleon, I think
that to cover it up by silence would be an
exaggeration of literary restraint. Let the
70

SOME REMINISCENCES

truth stand here. The responsibiUty rests
with the Man of St. Helena in view of his de-
plorable levity in the conduct of the Russian
campaign. It was during the memorable
retreat from Moscow that Mr. Nicholas B.,
in company of two brother officers — as
to whose morality and natural refinement
I know nothing — bagged a dog on the out-
skirts of a village and subsequently de-
voured him. As far as I can remember
the weapon used was a cavalry sabre, and
the issue of the sporting episode was rather
more of a matter of life and death than
if it had been an encounter with a tiger.
A picket of Cossacks was sleeping in that
village lost in the depths of the great
Lithuanian forest. The three sportsmen
had observed them from a hiding-place
making themselves very much at home
amongst the huts just before the early
winter darkness set in at four o'clock. They
had observed them with disgust and perhaps
with despair. Late in the night the rash
counsels of hunger overcame the dictates
of prudence. Crawling through the snow
they crept up to the fence of dry branches
which generally encloses a village in that
part of Lithuania. What they expected to

71

SOME REMINISCENCES

get and in what manner, and whether this
expectation was worth the risk, goodness
only knows. However, these Cossack parties,
in most cases wandering without an officer,
were known to guard themselves badly and
often not at all. In addition, the village
lying at a great distance from the line of
French retreat, they could not suspect the
presence of stragglers from the Grand Army.
The three officers had strayed away in a
blizzard from the main column and had
been lost for days in the woods, which ex-
plains sufficiently the terrible straits to
which they were reduced. Their plan was
to try and attract the attention of the
peasants in that one of the huts which was
nearest to the enclosure ; but as they were
preparing to venture into the very jaws
of the lion, so to speak, a dog (it is mighty
strange that there was but one), a creature
quite as formidable under the circumstances
as a lion, began to bark on the other side
of the fence. . . .

At this stage of the narrative, which I
heard many times (by request) from the
lips of Captain Nicholas B.'s sister-in-law,
my grandmother, I used to tremble with
excitement. i

72 1

SOME REMINISCENCES

The dog barked. And if he had done no
more than bark three officers of the Great
Napoleon's army would have perished hon-
ourably on the points of Cossacks' lances,
or perchance escaping the chase Avould have
died decently of starvation. But before
they had time to think of running away,
that fatal and revolting dog, being carried
away by the excess of his zeal, dashed out
through a gap in the fence. He dashed
out and died. His head, I understand, was
severed at one blow from his body. I under-
stand also that later on, within the gloomy
solitudes of the snow-laden woods, when,
in a sheltering hollow, a fire had been lit
by the party, the condition of the quarry
was discovered to be distinctly unsatisfac-
tory. It was not thin — on the contrary,
it seemed unhealthily obese ; its skin
showed bare patches of an unpleasant
character. However, they had not killed
that dog for the sake of the pelt. He
was large. ... He was eaten. . . . The
rest is silence. . . .

A silence in which a small boy shudders
and says firmly:

" I could not have eaten that dog."
And his grandmother remarks with a smile :

73

SOME REMINISCENCES

" Perhaps you don't know what it is to
be hungry."

I have learned something of it since.
Not that I have been reduced to eat dog.
I have fed on the emblematical animal,
which, in the language of the volatile Gauls,
is called la vache enragee ; I have lived on
ancient salt junk, I know the taste of shark,
of trepang, of snake, of nondescript dishes
containing things without a name — but of
the Lithuanian village dog — never ! I wish
it to be distinctly understood that it is
not I but my grand-uncle Nicholas, of the
Polish landed gentry, Chevalier de la Legion
d^Honneur, &c. &c., who, in his young days,
had eaten the Lithuanian dog.

I wish he had not. The childish horror
of the deed clings absurdly to the grizzled
man. I am perfectly helpless against it.
Still if he really had to, let us charitably
remember that he had eaten him on active
service, while bearing up bravely against
the greatest military disaster of modern
history, and, in a manner, for the sake of
his country. He had eaten him to appease
his hunger no doubt, but also for the sake of
an unappeasable and patriotic desire, in
the glow of a great faith that lives
74

SOME REMINISCENCES

still, and in the pursuit of a great
illusion kindled like a false beacon by a
great man to lead astray the effort of a
brave nation.

Pro patria !

Looked at in that light it appears a sweet
and decorous meal.

And looked at in the same light my own
diet of la vache enragee appears a fatuous
and extravagant form of self-indulgence ; for
why should I, the son of a land which such
men as these have turned up with their
ploughshares and bedewed with their blood,
undertake the pursuit of fantastic meals of
salt junk and hard tack upon the wide seas ?
On the kindest view it seems an unanswer-
able question. Alas ! I have the conviction
that there are men of unstained rectitude
who are ready to murmur scornfully the
word desertion. Thus the taste of inno-
cent adventure may be made bitter to the
palate. The part of the inexplicable should
be allowed for in appraising the conduct
of men in a world where no explanation is
final. No charge of faithlessness ought to
be lightly uttered. The appearances of this
perishable life are deceptive like every-
thing that falls under the judgment of our

75

SOME REMINISCENCES

imperfect senses. The inner voice may re-
main true enough in its secret counsel. The
fideUty to a special tradition may last
through the events of an unrelated existence,
following faithfully too the traced way of
an inexplicable impulserj

It would take too long to explain the
intimate alliance of contradictions in human
nature which makes love itself wear at
times the desperate shape of betrayal. And
perhaps there is no possible explanation.
Indulgence — as somebody said — is the most
' intelligent of all the virtues. I venture to
think that it is one of the least common,
if not the most uncommon of all. \ I would
not imply by this that men are fooUsh —
or even most men. Far from it. The barber
and the priest, backed by the whole opinion
of the village, condemned justly the conduct
of the ingenious hidalgo who, sallying forth
from his native place, broke the head of
the muleteer, put to death a flock of inoffen-
sive sheep, and went through very doleful
experiences in a certain stable. God forbid
that an unworthy churl should escape
merited censure by hanging on to the stirrup-
leather of the sublime caballero. His was
a very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit
76

SOME REMINISCENCES

for nothing except to raise the envy of baser
mortals. But there is more than one aspect
to the charm of that exalted and dangerous
figure. He, too, had his frailties. After
reading so many romances he desired naively
to escape with his very body from the
intolerable reality of things. He wished to
meet eye to eye the valorous giant Branda-
barbaran, Lord of Arabia, whose armour
is made of the skin of a dragon, and whose
shield, strapped to his arm, is the gate of a
fortified city. O amiable and natural weak-
ness ! O blessed simplicity of a gentle heart
without guile ! Who would not succumb
to such a consoling temptation ? Neverthe-
less it was a form of self-indulgence, and
the ingenious hidalgo of La Mancha was
not a good citizen. The priest and the
barber were not unreasonable in their stric-
tures. Without going so far as the old King
Louis-Philippe, who used to say in his exile,
" The people are never in fault " — one may
admit that there must be some righteousness
in the assent of a whole village. Mad !
Mad ! He who kept in pious meditation
the ritual vigil-of-arms by the well of an
inn and knelt reverently to be knighted at
daybreak by the fat, sly rogue of a landlord,

77

SOME REMINISCENCES

has come very near perfection. He rides
forth, his head encircled by a halo — the
patron saint of all lives spoiled or saved by
the irresistible grace of imagination. But
he was not a good citizen.

Perhaps that and nothing else was meant
by the well-remembered exclamation of my
tutor.

It was in the jolly year 1873, the very
last year in which I have had a jolly holiday.
There have been idle years afterwards, jolly
enough in a way and not altogether without
their lesson, but this year of which I speak
was the year of my last schoolboy holiday.
There are other reasons why I should re-
member that year, but they are too long to
state formally in this place. Moreover they
have nothing to do with that holiday. What
has to do with the holiday is that before
the day on which the remark was made we
had seen Vienna, the Upper Danube, Munich,
the Falls of the Rhine, the Lake of Constance
— in fact it was a memorable holiday of
travel. Of late we had been tramping
slowly up the Valley of the Reuss. It was
a delightful time. It was much more like
a stroll than a tramp. Landing from a Lake
of Lucerne steamer in Fluellen, we found
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SOME REMINISCENCES

ourselves at the end of the second day,
with the dusk overtaking our leisurely foot-
steps, a little way beyond Hospenthal. This
is not the day on which the remark was
made : in the shadows of the deep valley and
with the habitations of men left some way
behind, our thoughts ran not upon the
ethics of conduct but upon the simpler
human problem of shelter and food. There
did not seem anything of the kind in
sight, and we were thinking of turning
back when suddenly at a bend of the
road we came upon a building, ghostly in
the twilight.

At that time the work on the St. Gothard
Tunnel was going on, and that magnificent
enterprise of burrowing was directly re-
sponsible for the unexpected building,
standing all alone upon the very roots
of the mountains. It was long though
not big at all ; it was low ; it was built of
boards, without ornamentation, in barrack-
hut style, with the white window-frames
quite flush with the yellow face of its plain
front. . And yet it was an hotel ; it had even
a name which I have forgotten. But there
was no gold-laced door-keeper at its humble
door. A plain but vigorous servant-girl

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answered our inquiries, then a man and
woman who owned the place appeared. It
was clear that no travellers were expected,
or perhaps even desired, in this strange
hostelry, which in its severe style resembled
the house which surmounts the unseaworthy-
looking hulls of the toy Noah's Arks, the
universal possession of European childhood.
However, its roof was not hinged and it
was not full to the brim of slabsided and
painted animals of wood. Even the live
tourist animal was nowhere in evidence.
We had something to eat in a long, narrow
room at one end of a long, narrow table,
which, to my tired perception and to my
sleepy eyes, seemed as if it would tilt up
like a see-saw plank, since there was no
one at the other end to balance it against
our two dusty and travel-stained figures.
Then we hastened upstairs to bed in a
room smelling of pine planks, and I was
fast asleep before my head touched the
pillow.

In the morning my tutor (he was a
student of the Cracow University) woke me
up early, and as we were dressing remarked :
" There seems to be a lot of people staying
in this hotel. I have heard a noise of talking

80

SOME REMINISCENCES

up till 11 o'clock ? " This statement sur-
prised me ; I had heard no noise whatever,
having slept like a top.

We went downstairs into the long and
narrow dining-room with its long and narrow
table. There were tw^o rows of plates on it.
At one of the many uncurtained windows
stood a tall bony man with a bald head set
off by a bunch of black hair above each
ear and with a long black beard. He
glanced up from the paper he was reading
and seemed genuinely astonished at our
intrusion. By-and-by more men came
in. Not one of them looked like a
tourist. Not a single woman appeared.
These men seemed to know each other with
some intimacy, but I cannot say they were
a very talkative lot. The bald-headed man
sat down gravely at the head of the table.
It all had the air of a family party. By-
and-by, from one of the vigorous servant-
girls in national costume, we discovered
that the place was really a boarding-house
for some English engineers engaged at the
w^orks of the St. Got hard Tunnel ; and I
could listen my fill to the sounds of the
English language, as far as it is used at a
breakfast-table by men who do not believe

F 81

SOME REMINISCENCES

in wasting many words on the mere amenities
of life.

This was my first contact with British
mankind apart from the tourist kind seen
in the hotels of Zurich and Lucerne — the
kind which has no real existence in a
workaday world. I know now that the
bald-headed man spoke with a strong Scotch
accent. I have met many of his kind since,
both ashore and afloat. The second en-
gineer of the steamer Mavis, for instance,
ouffht to have been his twin brother. I
cannot help thinking that he really was,
though for some reasons of his own he assured
me that he never had a twin brother.
Anyway the deliberate bald-headed Scot
with the coal-black beard appeared to my
boyish eyes a very romantic and mysterious
person.

We slipped out unnoticed. Our mapped-
out route led over the Furca Pass towards
the Rhone Glacier, with the further inten-
tion of following down the trend of the Hasli
Valley. The sun was already declining when
we found ourselves on the top of the pass,
and the remark alluded to was presently
uttered.

We sat down by the side of the road
82

SOME REMINISCENCES

to continue the argument begun half a mile
or so before. I am certain it was an argu-
ment because I remember perfectly how
my tutor argued and how without the power
of reply I listened with my eyes fixed
obstinately on the ground. A stir on the
road made me look up — and then I saw
my unforgettable Englishman. There are
acquaintances of later years, familiars, ship-
mates, whom I remember less clearly. He
marched rapidly towards the east (attended
by a hang-dog Swiss guide) with the mien
of an ardent and fearless traveller. He was
clad in a knickerbocker suit, but as at the
same time he wore short socks under his
laced boots, for reasons which whether
hygienic or conscientious were surely imagi-
native, his calves exposed to the public gaze
and to the tonic air of high altitudes,
dazzled the beholder by the splendour of
their marble-like condition and their rich
tone of young ivory. He was the leader
of a small caravan. The light of a headlong,
exalted satisfaction with the world of men
and the scenery of mountains illumined his
clean-cut, very red face, his short, silver-
white whiskers, his innocently eager
and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast a

83

SOME REMINISCENCES

glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly
gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth towards
the man and the boy sitting like dusty
tramps by the roadside, with a modest
knapsack lying at their feet. His white
calves twinkled sturdily, the uncouth Swiss
guide with a surly mouth stalked like an
unwilling bear at his elbow ; a small train
of three mules followed in single file the
lead of this inspiring enthusiast. Two
ladies rode past one behind the other, but
from the way they sat I saw only their
calm, uniform backs, and the long ends of
blue veils hanging behind far down over
their identical hat-brims. His two daughters
surely. An industrious luggage-mule, with
unstarched ears and guarded by a slouching,
sallow driver, brought up the rear. My tutor,
after pausing for a look and a faint smile,
resumed his earnest argument.

I tell you it was a memorable year !
Oqc does not meet such an Englishman
tAvice in a lifetime. Was he in the mystic
ordering of common events the ambassador
of my future, sent out to turn the scale at
a critical moment on the top of an Alpine
pass, with the peaks of the Bernese Oberland
for mute and solemn witnesses ? His glance,
84

SOME REMINISCENCES

his smile, the unextinguishablc and comic
ardour of his striving-forward appearance
helped me to pull myself together. It must
be stated that on that day and in the
exhilarating atmosphere of that elevated
spot I had been feeling utterly crushed.
It was the year in which I had first spoken
aloud of my desire to go to sea. At first
like those sounds that, ranging outside the
scale to which men's ears are attuned, re-
main inaudible to our sense of hearing,
this declaration passed unperceived. It
was as if it had not been. Later on, by
trying various tones I managed to arouse
here and there a surprised momentary atten-
tion— the " What was that funny noise ? "
sort of inquiry. Later on it was — " Did
you hear what that boy said ? What an
extraordinary outbreak ! " Presently a wave
of scandalised astonishment (it could not
have been greater if I had announced the
intention of entering a Carthusian monas-
tery) ebbing out of the educational and
academical town of Cracow spread itself
over several provinces. It spread itself
shallow but far-reaching. It stirred up a
mass of remonstrance, indignation, pitying
wonder, bitter irony and downright chaff.

85

SOME REMINISCENCES

I could hardly breathe under its weight,
and certainly had no words for an answer.
People wondered what Mr. T. B. would do
now with his worrying nephew and, I dare
say, hoped kindly that he would make
short work of my nonsense.

What he did was to come down all the
way from Ukraine to have it out with me
and to judge by himself, unprejudiced,
impartial and just, taking his stand on
the ground of wisdom and affection. As
far as is possible for a boy whose power of
expression is still unformed I opened the
secret of my thoughts to him and he in
return allowed me a glimpse into his mind
and heart ; the first glimpse of an inex-
haustible and noble treasure of clear thought
and warm feeling, which through life was
to be mine to draw upon with a never-
deceived love and confidence. Practically,
after several exhaustive conversations, he
concluded that he would not have me later
on reproach him for having spoiled my
life by an unconditional opposition. But
I must take time for serious reflection.
And I must not only think of myself but
of others ; weigh the claims of affection
and conscience against my own sincerity
86

SOME REMINISCENCES

of purpose. " Think well what it all means
in the larger issues, my boy," he exhorted
me finally with special friendliness. " And
meantime try to get the best place you can
at the /early examinations."

The scholastic year came to an end. I
took a fairly good place at the exams.,
which for me (for certain reasons) happened
to be a nore difficult task than for other
boys. In that respect I could enter with
a good conscience upon that holiday which
was like a long visit pour prendre conge of
the mainland of old Europe I was to see
so little of for the next four and twenty
years. Such, however, was not the avowed
purpose of that tour. It was rather, I
suspect, plamied in order to distract and
occupy my thoughts in other directions.
Nothing had been said for months of my
going to sea. But my attachment to my
young tutor and his influence over me were
so well known that he must have received
a confidential mission to talk me out of my
romantic folly. It was an excellently appro-
priate arrangement, as neither he nor I
had ever had a single glimpse of the sea
in our lives. That was to come by-and-by
for both of us in Venice, from the outer

S7

SOME REMINISCENCES

shore of Lido. Meantime he had taken his
mission to heart so well that I began to
feel crushed before we reached Zurich, He
argued in railway trains, in lake steamboats,
he had argued away for me the obligatory
sunrise on the Righi, by Jove ! Of his de-
votion to his unworthy pupil there can be
no doubt. He had proved it already by
two years of unremitting and arduous care.
I could not hate him. But he had been
crushing me slowly, and when he started to
argue on the top of the Furca Pass he was
perhaps nearer a success than either he or
I imagined. I listened to him in despairing
silence, feeling that ghostly, unrealised and
desired sea of my dreams escape from the
unnerved grip of my will.

The enthusiastic old Englishman had
passed — and the argument went on. What
reward could I expect from such a life at
the end of my years, either in ambition,
honour or conscience ? An unanswerable
question. But I felt no longer crushed.
Then our eyes met and a genuine emotion
was visible in liis as well as in mine.
The end came all at once. He picked
up the knapsack suddenly and got on to
his feet.
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SOME REMINISCENCES

" You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don
Quixote. That's what you are."

I was surprised. I was only fifteen and
did not know what he meant exactly. But
I felt vaguely flattered at the name of the
immortal knight turning up in connection
with my own folly, as some people would
call it to my face. Alas ! I don't think
there was anything to be proud of. Mine
was not the stuff the protectors of forlorn
damsels, the redressers of this world's wrongs
are made of ; and my tutor was the man
to know that best. Therein, in his indigna-
tion, he was superior to the barber and the
priest when he flung at me an honoured
name like a reproach.

I walked behind him for full five
minutes ; then without looking back he
stopped. The shadovfs of distant peaks
were lengthening over the Furca Pass.
When I came up to him he turned to
me and in full view of the Finster-
Aarhorn, with his band of giant brothers
rearing their monstrous heads against a
brilliant sky, put his hand on my shoulder
affectionately.

" Well ! That's enough. We will have
no more of it."

89

SOME REMINISCENCES

And indeed there was no more question
of my mysterious vocation between us.
There was to be no more question of it
at all, nowhere or with any one. We began
the descent of the Furca Pass conversing
merrily. Eleven years later, month for
month, I stood on Tower Hill on the steps
of the St. Katherine's Dockhouse, a master
in the British Merchant Service. But the
man who put his hand on my shoulder at
the top of the Furca Pass was no longer
living.

That very year of our travels he took his
degree of the Philosophical Faculty — and
only then his true vocation declared itself.
Obedient to the call he entered at once
upon the four-year course of the Medical
Schools. A day came when, on the deck
of a ship moored in Calcutta, I opened a
letter telling me of the end of an enviable
existence. He had made for himself a
practice in some obscure little town of
Austrian Galicia. And the letter went on
to tell me how all the bereaved poor of the
district. Christians and Jews alike, had
mobbed the good doctor's coffin with sobs
and lamentations at the very gate of the
cemetery.
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SOME REMINISCENCES

How short his years and how clear his
vision ! What greater reward in ambition,
honour and conscience could he have hoped
to win for himself when, on the top of the
Furca Pass, he bade me look well to the
end of my opening life.

91

Ill

The devouring in a dismal forest of a
luckless Lithuanian dog by my grand-uncle
Nicholas B. in company of two other mili-
tary and famished scarecrows, symbolised,
to my childish imagination, the whole horror
of the retreat from Moscow and the im-
morality of a conqueror's ambition. An
extreme distaste for that objectionable epi-
sode has tinged the views I hold as to the
character and achievements of Napoleon
the Great. I need not say that these
are unfavourable. It was morally repre-
hensible for that great captain to induce
a simple-minded Polish gentleman to eat
dog by raising in his breast a false hope
of national independence. It has been the
fate of that credulous nation to starve for
upwards of a hundred years on a diet of
false hopes and — well — dog. It is, when one
thinks of it, a singularly poisonous regimen.
Some pride in the national constitution
which has survived a long course of such
dishes is really excusable. But enough of
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SOME REMINISCENCES

generalising. Returning to particulars, Mr.
Nicholas B. confided to his sister-in-law
(my grandmother) in his misanthropically
laconic manner that this supper in the
woods had been nearly " the death of him."
This is not surprising. What surprises
me is that the story was ever heard of ;
for grand-uncle Nicholas differed in this
from the generality of military men of
Napoleon's time (and perhaps of all time),
that he did not like to talk of his campaigns,
which began at Friedland and ended some-
where in the neighbourhood of Bar-le-Duc.
His admiration of the great Emperor was
unreserved in everything but expression.
Like the religion of earnest men, it was too
profound a sentiment to be displayed before
a world of little faith. Apart from that he
seemed as completely devoid of military
anecdotes as though he had hardly ever
seen a soldier in his life. Proud of his
decorations earned before he was twenty-
five, he refused to wear the ribbons at the
buttonhole in the manner practised to this
day in Europe and even was unwilling to
display the insignia on festive occasions, as
though he wished to conceal them in the
fear of appearing boastful. "It is enough

93

SOME REMINISCENCES

that I have them," he used to mutter. In
the course of thirty years they were seen
on his breast only twice — at an auspicious
marriage in the family and at the funeral
of an old friend. That the wedding which
was thus honoured was not the wedding of
my mother I learned only late in life, too
late to bear a grudge against Mr. Nicholas
B., who made amends at my birth by a
long letter of congratulation containing the
following prophecy : " He will see better
times." Even in his embittered heart
there lived a hope. But he was not a true
prophet.

He was a man of strange contradictions.
Living for many years in his brother's house,
the home of many children, a house full
of life, of animation, noisy with a constant
coming and going of many guests, he kept his
habits of solitude and silence. Considered
as obstinately secretive in all his purposes,
he was in reality the victim of a most painful
irresolution in all matters of civil life. Under
his taciturn, phlegmatic behaviour was hid-
den a faculty of short-lived passionate anger.
I suspect he had no talent for narrative ; but
it seemed to afford him sombre satisfaction
to declare that he was the last man to ride
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SOME REMINISCENCES

over the bridge of the river Elster after
the battle of Leipsic. Lest some construction
favourable to his valour should be put on
the fact he condescended to explain how
it came to pass. It seems that shortly after
the retreat began he was sent back to the
town where some divisions of the French
Army (and amongst them the Polish corps
of Prince Joseph Poniatowski), jammed hope-
lessly in the streets, were being simply
exterminated by the troops of the Allied
Powers. When asked what it was like in
there Mr. Nicholas B. muttered the only
word " Shambles." Having delivered his
message to the Prince he hastened away
at once to render an account of his mission
to the superior who had sent him. By
that time the advance of the enemy had
enveloped the town, and he was shot at
from houses and chased all the way to the
river bank by a disorderly mob of Austrian
Dragoons and Prussian Hussars. The bridge
had been mined early in the morning and
his opinion was that the sight of the
horsemen converging from many sides in
the pursuit of his person alarmed the officer
in command of the sappers and caused the
premature firing of the charges. He had

95

SOME REMINISCENCES

not gone more than 200 yards on the other
side when he heard the sound of the fatal
explosions. Mr. Nicholas B. concluded his
bald narrative with the word " Imbecile "
uttered with the utmost deliberation. It
testified to his indignation at the loss of so
many thousands of lives. But his phlegmatic
physiognomy lighted up when he spoke of
his only wound, with something resembling
satisfaction. You will see that there was
some reason for it when you learn that he
was wounded in the heel. " Like his Majesty
the Emperor Napoleon himself," he re-
minded his hearers with assumed indifference.
There can be no doubt that the indifference
was assumed, if one thinks what a very
distinguished sort of wound it was. In all the
history of warfare there are, I believe, only
three warriors publicly known to have been
wounded in the heel — Achilles and Napoleon
— demi-gods indeed — to whom the familial
piety of an unworthy descendant adds the
name of the simple mortal, Nicholas B.

The Hundred Days found Mr. Nicholas B.
staying with a distant relative of ours,
owner of a small estate in Galicia. How
he got there across the breadth of an armed
Europe and after what adventures I am
96

SOME REMINISCENCES

afraid will never be known now. All his
papers were destroyed shortly before his
death ; but if there was amongst them,
as he affirmed, a concise record of his life,
then I am pretty sure it did not take up
more than a half-sheet of foolscap or so.
This relative of ours happened to be an
Austrian officer, who had left the service after
the battle of Austerlitz. Unlike Mr. Nicholas
B., who concealed his decorations, he liked
to display his honourable discharge in which
he was mentioned as unschreckbar (fearless)
before the enemy. No conjunction could
seem more unpromising, yet it stands in
the family tradition that these two got on
very well together in their rural solitude.

^Vhen asked whether he had not been
sorely tempted during the Hundred Days
to make his way again to France and
join the service of his beloved Emperor,
Mr. Nicholas B. used to mutter : " No
money. No horse. Too far to walk."

The fall of Napoleon and the ruin of
national hopes affected adversely the charac-
ter of Mr. Nicholas B. He shrank from
returning to his province. But for that
there was also another reason. Mr. Nicholas
B. and his brother — my maternal grand-

G 97

SOME REMINISCENCES

father — had lost their father early, while
they were quite children. Their mother,
young still and left very well off, married
again a man of great charm and of an
amiable disposition but without a penny.
He turned out an affectionate and careful
stepfather ; it was unfortunate though that
while directing the boys' education and
forming their character by wise counsel he
did his best to get hold of the fortune by
buying and selling land in his own name
and investing capital in such a manner as
to cover up the traces of the real ownership.
It seems that such practices can be successful
if one is charming enough to dazzle one's
own wife permanently and brave enough
to defy the vain terrors of public opinion.
The critical time came when the elder of
the boys on attaining his majority in the
year 1811 asked for the accounts and some
part at least of the inheritance to begin life
upon. It was then that the stepfather
declared with calm finality that there were
no accounts to render and no property to
inherit. The whole fortune was his very
own. He was very good-natured about the
young man's misapprehension of the true
state of affairs, but of course felt obliged
98

SOME REMINISCENCES

to maintain his position firmly. Old friends
came and went busily, voluntary mediators
appeared travelling on most horrible roads
from the most distant corners of the three
provinces ; and the Marshal of the No-
bility (ex-qfficio guardian of all well-born
oiphans) called a meeting of landowners to
" ascertain in a friendly way how the mis-
understanding between X and his stepsons
had arisen and devise proper measures to
remove the same." A deputation to that
effect visited X, who treated them to ex-
cellent wines, but absolutelv refused his ear
to their remonstrances. As to the proposals
for arbitration he simply laughed at them ;
yet the whole province must have been aware
that fourteen years before, when he married
the widow, all his visible fortune consisted
(apart from his social qualities) in a smart
four-horse turn-out with two servants, with
whom he went about visiting from house to
house ; and as to any funds he might have
possessed at that time their existence could
only be inferred from the fact that he was
very punctual in settling his modest losses
at cards. But by the magic power of stub-
born and constant assertion, there were
found presently, here and there, people who

99

SOME REMINISCENCES

mumbled that surely " there must be some-
thing in it." However, on his next name-day
(which he used to celebrate by a great three-
days' shooting-party), of all the invited
crowd only two guests turned up, distant
neighbours of no importance ; one notori-
ously a fool, and the other a very pious and
honest person but such a passionate lover
of the gun that on his own confession he
could not have refused an invitation to a
shooting-party from the devil himself. X
met this manifestation of public opinion with
the serenity of an unstained conscience.
He refused to be crushed. Yet he must have
been a man of deep feeling, because, when
his wife took openly the part of her children,
he lost his beautiful tranquillity, proclaimed
himself heart-broken and drove her out of
the house, neglecting in his grief to give
her enough time to pack her trunks.

This was the beginning of a lawsuit, an
abominable marvel of chicane, which by the
use of every legal subterfuge was made to
last for many j^ears. It was also the occasion
for a display of much kindness and sympathy.
All the neighbouring houses flew open for the
reception of the homeless. Neither legal aid
nor material assistance in the prosecution
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SOME REMINISCENCES

of the suit was ever *vanting. X, on his
side, went about shedding tears pubHcly
over his stepchildren's ingratitude and his
wife's bhnd infatuation ; but as at the same
time he displayed great cleverness in the
art of concealing material documents (he
was even suspected of having burnt a lot
of historically interesting family papers),
this scandalous litigation had to be ended
by a compromise lest worse should befall.
It was settled finally by a surrender, out of
the disputed estate, in full satisfaction of all
claims, of two villages with the names of
which I do not intend to trouble my readers.
After this lame and impotent conclusion
neither the wife nor the stepsons had any-
thing to say to the man who had presented
the world with such a successful example
of self-help based on character, determina-
tion and industry ; and my great-grand-
mother, her health completely broken down,
died a couple of years later in Carlsbad.
Legally secured by a decree in the possession
of his plunder, X regained his wonted seren-
ity and went on living in the neighbourhood
in a comfortable style and in apparent peace
of mind. His big shoots were fairly well
attended again. He was never tired of assur-

101

SOME REMINISCENCES

ing people that he bore no grudge for what
was past ; he protested loudly of his con-
stant affection for his wife and stepchildren.
It was true he said that they had tried
their best to strip him as naked as a Turkish
saint in the decline of his days ; and because
he had defended himself from spoliation, as
anybody else in his place would have done,
they had abandoned him now to the horrors
of a solitary old age. Nevertheless, his love
for them survived these cruel blows. And
there might have been some truth in his
protestations. Very soon he began to make
overtures of friendship to his eldest stepson,
my maternal grandfather ; and when these
were peremptorily rejected he went on
renewing them again and again with charac-
teristic obstinacy. For years he persisted
in his efforts at reconciliation, promising my
grandfather to execute a will in his favour
if he only would be friends again to the
extent of calling now and then (it was
fairly close neighbourhood for these parts,
forty miles or so), or even of putting in an
appearance for the great shoot on the name-
day. My grandfather was an ardent lover
of every sport. His temperament was as
free from hardness and animosity as can be
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SOME REMINISCENCES

imagined. Pupil of the liberal-minded Bene-
dictines who directed the only public school
of some standing then in the south, he had
also read deeply the authors of the eighteenth
century. In him Christian charity was joined
to a philosophical indulgence for the failings
of human nature. But the memory of
these miserably anxious early years, his
young man's years robbed of all generous
illusions by the cynicism of the sordid
lawsuit, stood in the way of forgiveness.
He never succumbed to the fascination of
the great shoot ; and X, his heart set to
the last on reconciliation with the draft
of the will ready for signature kept by his
bedside, died intestate. The fortune thus
acquired and augmented by a wise and
careful management passed to some distant
relatives whom he had never seen and who
even did not bear his name.

Meantime the blessing of general peace
descended upon Europe. Mr. Nicholas B.,
bidding good-bye to his hospitable relative,
the " fearless " Austrian officer, departed
from Galicia, and without going near his
native place, where the odious lawsuit was
still going on, proceeded straight to Warsaw
and entered the army of the newly consti-

103

SOME REMINISCENCES

tuted Polish kingdom under the sceptre of
Alexander I., Autocrat of all the Russias.

This kingdom, created by the Vienna
Congress as an acknowledgment to a nation
of its former independent existence, included
only the central provinces of the old Polish
patrimony. A brother of the Emperor,
the Grand Duke Constantine (Pavlovitch),
its Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief, married
morganatically to a Polish lady to whom
he was fiercely attached, extended this
affection to what he called " My Poles " in
a capricious and savage manner. Sallow
in complexion, with a Tartar physiognomy
and fierce little eyes, he walked with his
fists clenched, his body bent forward, dart-
ing suspicious glances from under an enor-
mous cocked hat. His intelligence was
limited and his sanity itself was doubtful.
The hereditary taint expressed itself, in
his case, not by mystic leanings as in his
two brothers, Alexander and Nicholas (in
their various ways, for one was mystically
liberal and the other mystically autocratic),
but by the fury of an uncontrollable temper
which generally broke out in disgusting
abuse on the parade ground. He was a
passionate militarist and an amazing drill-
104

SOME REMINISCENCES

master. He treated his Polish Army as a
spoiled child treats a favourite toy, except
that he did not take it to bed with him at
night. It was not small enough for that.
But he played with it all day and every day,
delighting in the variety of pretty uniforms
and in the fun of incessant drilling. This
childish passion, not for war but for mere
militarism, achieved a desirable result. The
Polish Army, in its equipment, in its arma-
ment and in its battlefield efficiency, as
then understood, became, by the end of
the year 1830, a first-rate tactical instrument.
Polish peasantry (not serfs) served in the
ranks by enlistment, and the officers be-
longed mainly to the smaller nobility. Mr.
Nicholas B., with his Napoleonic record,
had no difficulty in obtaining a lieutenancy,
but the promotion in the Polish Army was
slow, because, being a separate organisation,
it took no part in the wars of the Russian
Empire either against Persia or Turkey.
Its first campaign, against Russia itself,
was to be its last. In 1831, on the outbreak
of the Revolution, Mr. Nicholas B. was the
senior captain of his regiment. Some time
before he had been made head of the re-
mount establishment quartered outside the

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SOME REMINISCENCES

kingdom in our southern provinces, whence
almost all the horses for the Polish cavalry
were drawn. For the first time since he went
away from home at the age of eighteen to
begin his military life by the battle of
Friedland, Mr. Nicholas B. breathed the
air of the " Border," his native air. Unkind
fate was lying in wait for him amongst the
scenes of his youth. At the first news of the
rising in Warsaw all the remount establish-
ment, officers, vets., and the very troopers,
were put promptly under arrest and hurried
off in a body beyond the Dnieper to the
nearest town in Russia proper. From there
they were dispersed to the distant parts of
the Empire. On this occasion poor Mr.
Nicholas B. penetrated into Russia much
farther than he ever did in the times of
Napoleonic invasion, if much less willingly.
Astrakhan was his destination. He remained
there three years, allowed to live at large
in the town but having to report himself
every day at noon to the military com-
mandant, who used to detain him frequently
for a pipe and a chat. It is difficult to form
a just idea of what a chat with Mr. Nicholas
B. could have been like. There must have
been much compressed rage under his taci-
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SOME REMINISCENCES

turnity, for the commandant communicated
to him the news from the theatre of war
and this news was such as it could be, that
is, very bad for the Poles. Mr. Nicholas B.
received these communications with outward
phlegm, but the Russian showed a warm
sympathy for his prisoner. " As a soldier
myself I understand your feelings. You, of
course, would like to be in the thick of it.
By heavens ! I am fond of you. If it were
not for the terms of the military oath I
would let you go on my own responsibility.
What difference could it make to us, one
more or less of you ? "

At other times he wondered with sim-
plicity.

" Tell me, Nicholas Stepanovitch " — (my
great-grandfather's name was Stephen and
the commandant used the Russian form
of polite address) — " tell me why is it that
you Poles are always looking for trouble ?
What else could you expect from running
up against Russia ? "

He was capable, too, of philosophical
reflections.

" Look at your Napoleon now. A great
man. There is no denying it that he was a
great man as long as he was content to

107

SOME REMINISCENCES

thrash those Germans and Austrians and
all those nations. But no ! He must go
to Russia looking for trouble, and what's
the consequence ? Such as you see me, I
have rattled this sabre of mine on the
pavements of Paris."

After his return to Poland Mr. Nicholas B.
described him as a " worthy man but
stupid," whenever he could be induced to
speak of the conditions of his exile. De-
clining the option offered him to enter the
Russian Army he was retired with only
half the pension of his rank. His nephew
(my uncle and guardian) told me that the
first lasting impression on his memory as a
child of four was the glad excitement reign-
ing in his parents' house on the day when
Mr. Nicholas B. arrived home from his
detention in Russia.

Every generation has its memories. The
first memories of Mr. Nicholas B. might
have been shaped by the events of the
last partition of Poland, and he lived long
enough to suffer from the last armed
rising in 1863, an event which affected
the future of- all my generation and has
coloured my earliest impressions. His
brother, in whose house he had sheltered
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SOME REMINISCENCES

for some seventeen years his misanthropical
timidity before the commonest problems of
life, having died in the early fifties, Mr.
Nicholas B. had to screw his courage up
to the sticking-point and come to some
decision as to the future. After a long and
agonising hesitation he was persuaded at last
to become the tenant of some fifteen hundred
acres out of the estate of a friend in the neigh-
bourhood. The terms of the lease were very
advantageous, but the retired situation of
the village and a plain comfortable house
in good repair were, I fancy, the greatest
inducements. He lived there quietly for
about ten years, seeing very few people and
taking no part in the public life of the
province, such as it could be under an
arbitrary bureaucratic tyranny. His charac-
ter and his patriotism were above suspicion ;
but the organisers of the rising in their
frequent journeys up and down the province
scrupulously avoided coming near his house.
It was generally felt that the repose of the
old man's last years ought not to be dis-
turbed. Even such intimates as my pater-
nal grandfather, a comrade-in-arms during
Napoleon's Moscow campaign and later on a
fellow- officer in the Polish Army, refrained

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SOME REMINISCENCES

from visiting his crony as the date of the
outbreak approached. My paternal grand-
father's two sons and his only daughter
were all deeply involved in the revolutionary
work ; he himself was of that type of Polish
squire whose only ideal of patriotic action
was to " get into the saddle and drive them
out." But even he agreed that " dear
Nicholas must not be worried." All this
considerate caution on the part of friends,
both conspirators and others, did not pre-
vent Mr. Nicholas B. being made to feel
the misfortunes of that ill-omened year.

Less than forty-eight hours after the
beginning of the rebellion in that part of
the country, a squadron of scouting Cossacks
passed through the village and invaded the
homestead. Most of them remained formed
between the house and the stables, while
several, dismounting, ransacked the various
outbuildings. The officer in command, ac-
companied by two men, walked up to the
front door. All the blinds on that side were
down. The officer told the servant who
received him that he wanted to see his
master. He was answered that the master
was away from home, which was perfectly
true.
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SOME REMINISCENCES

I follow here the tale as told afterwards
by the servant to my grand-uncle's friends
and relatives, and as I have heard it re-
peated.

On receiving this answer the Cossack
officer, who had been standing in the porch,
stepped into the house.

" Where is the master gone, then ? "

" Our master went to J " (the govern-
ment town some fifty miles off), " the day
before yesterday."

" There are only two horses in the stables.
"Where are the others ? "

" Our master always travels with his own
horses " (meaning : not by post). " He
will be away a week or more. He was
pleased to mention to me that he had to
attend to some business in the Civil Court."

While the servant was speaking the officer
looked about the hall. There was a door
facing him, a door to the right and a door
to the left. The officer chose to enter the
room on the left and ordered the blinds to
be pulled up. It was Mr. Nicholas B.'s
study with a couple of tall bookcases, some
pictures on the walls, and so on. Besides
the big centre table, with books and papers,
there was a quite small writing-table with

111

SOME REMINISCENCES

several drawers, standing between the door
and the window in a good light ; and at
this table my grand-uncle usually sat either
to read or write.

On pulling up the blind the servant was
startled by the discovery that the whole
male population of the village was massed
in front, trampling down the flower-beds.
There were also a few women amongst
them. He was glad to observe the village
priest (of the Orthodox Church) coming
up the drive. The good man in his haste
had tucked up his cassock as high as the
top of his boots.

The officer had been looking at the backs
of the books in the bookcases. Then he
perched himself on the edge of the centre-
table and remarked easily :

" Your master did not take you to town
with him, then."

" I am the head servant and he leaves me
in charge of the house. It's a strong, young
chap that travels with our master. If—
God forbid — there was some accident on
the road he would be of much more use
than I."

Glancing through the window he saw the
priest arguing vehemently in the thick of
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SOME REMINISCENCES

the crowd, which seemed subdued by his
interference. Three or four men, however,
were talking with the Cossacks at the door.
" And you don't think your master has
gone to join the rebels maybe — eh ? " asked
the officer.

" Our master would be too old for that
surely. He's well over seventy and he's
getting feeble too. It's some years now
since he's been on horseback and he can't
walk much either now."

The officer sat there swinging his leg,
very quiet and indifferent. By that time
the peasants who had been talking with
the Cossack troopers at the door had been
permitted to get into the hall. One or two
more left the crowd and followed them
in. They were seven in all and amongst
them the blacksmith, an ex-soldier. The
servant appealed deferentially to the
officer.

" Won't your honour be pleased to tell
the people to go back to their homes ?
What do they want to push themselves
into the house like this for ? It's not proper
for them to behave like this while our
master's away and I am responsible for
everything here."

H 113

SOME REMINISCENCES

The officer only laughed a little, and
after a while inquired :

" Have you any arms in the house ? "
" Yes. We have. Some old things."
" Bring them all, here, on to this table."
The servant made another attempt to
obtain protection.

" Won't your honour tell these chaps . . . ?"
But the officer looked at him in silence
in such a way that he gave it up at once
and hurried off to call the pantry-boy to
help him collect the arms. Meantime the
officer walked slowly through all the rooms
in the house, examining them attentively
but touching nothing. The peasants in the
hall fell back and took off their caps when
he passed through. He said nothing what-
ever to them. When he came back to
the study all the arms to be found in the
house were lying on the table. There was
a pair of big ffint-lock holster pistols from
Napoleonic times, two cavalry swords, one
of the French the other of the Polish Army
pattern, with a fowling-piece or two.

The officer, opening the window, flung
out pistols, swords and guns, one after
another, and his troopers ran to pick them
up. The peasants in the hall, encouraged
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SOME REMINISCENCES

by his manner, had stolen after him into
the study. He gave not the sHghtest
sign of being conscious of their existence
and, his business being apparently concluded,
strode out of the house without a word.
Directly he left, the peasants in the study
put on their caps and began to smile at
each other.

The Cossacks rode away, passing through
the yards of the home farm straight into
the fields. The priest, still arguing with
the peasants, moved gradually down the
drive and his earnest eloquence was drawing
the silent mob after him, away from the
house. This justice must be rendered to
the parish priests of the Greek Church that,
strangers to the country as they were (being
all drawn from the interior of Russia), the
majority of them used such influence as
they had over their flocks in the cause of
peace and humanity. True to the spirit
of their calling, they tried to soothe the
passions of the excited peasantry and op-
posed rapine and violence whenever they
could, with all their might. And this conduct
they pursued against the express wishes of
the authorities. Later on some of them
were made to suffer for this disobedience

115

SOME REMINISCENCES

by being removed abruptly to the far north
or sent away to Siberian parishes.

The servant was anxious to get rid of
the few peasants who had got into the
house. \Vliat sort of conduct was that, he
asked them, towards a man who was only a
tenant, had been invariably good and con-
siderate to the villagers for years ; and
only the other day had agreed to give up
two meadows for the use of the village herd ?
He reminded them, too, of Mr. Nicholas B.'s
devotion to the sick in the time of cholera.
Every word of this was true and so far
effective that the fellows began to scratch
their heads and look irresolute. The speaker
then pointed at the window, exclaiming:
*' Look ! there's all your crowd going away
quietly and you silly chaps had better go
after them and pray God to forgive you
your evil thoughts."

This appeal was an unlucky inspiration.
In crowding clumsily to the window to
see whether he was speaking the truth,
the fellows overturned the little writing-
table. As it fell over a chink of loose coin
was heard. " There's money in that thing,"
cried the blacksmith. In a moment the top
of the delicate piece of furniture was smashed
116

SOME REMINISCENCES

and there lay exposed in a drawer eighty
half-imperials. Gold coin was a rare sight
in Russia even at that time ; it put the
peasants beside themselves. " There must
be more of that in the house and we shall
have it," yelled the ex-soldier blacksmith.
" This is war time." The others were
already shouting out of the window urging
the crowd to come back and help. The
priest, abandoned suddenly at the gate,
flung his arms up and hurried away so as
not to see what was going to happen.

In their search for money that bucolic mob
smashed everything in the house, ripping
with knives, splitting with hatchets, so
that, as the servant said, there were no
two pieces of wood holding together left
in the whole house. They broke some very
fine mirrors, all the windows and every
piece of glass and china. They threw the
books and papers out on the lawn and set
fire to the heap for the mere fun of the
thing apparently. Absolutely the only one
solitary thing which they left whole was
a small ivory crucifix, which remained hang-
ing on the wall in the wrecked bedroom
above a wild heap of rags, broken mahogany
and splintered boards which had been

117

SOME REMINISCENCES

Mr. Nicholas B.'s bedstead. Detecting the
servant in the act of steahng away with
a Japanned tin box, they tore it from him,
and because he resisted they threw him
out of the dining-room window. The house
was on one floor but raised well above the
ground, and the fall was so serious that
the man remained lying stunned till the
cook and a stable-boy ventured forth at
dusk from their hiding-places and picked
him up. By that time the mob had de-
parted carrying off the tin box, which they
supposed to be full of paper money. Some
distance from the house in the middle of a
field they broke it open. They found
inside documents engrossed on parchment
and the two crosses of the Legion of Honour
and For Valour. At the sight of these
objects, which, the blacksmith explained,
were marks of honour given only by the
Tsar, they became extremely frightened at
wiiat they had done. They threw the whole
lot away into a ditch and dispersed hastily.
On learning of this particular loss Mr.
Nicholas B. broke down completely. The
mere sacking of his house did not seem to
affect him much. While he was still in bed
from the shock the two crosses were found
118

SOME REMINISCENCES

and returned to him. It helped somewhat
his slow convalescence, but the tin box and
the parchments, though searched for in all
the ditches around, never turned up again.
He could not get over the loss of his Legion
of Honour Patent, whose preamble, setting
forth his services, he knew by heart to the
very letter, and after this blow volunteered
sometimes to recite, tears standing in his
eyes the while. Its terms haunted him
apparently during the last two years of his
life to such an extent that he used to repeat
them to himself. This is confirmed by the
remark made more than once by his old
servant to the more intimate friends. "What
makes my heart heavy is to hear our master
in his room at night walking up and down
and praying aloud in the French language."
It must have been somewhat over a year
afterwards that I saw Mr. Nicholas B., or,
more correctly, that he saw me, for the
last time. It was, as I have already said,
at the time when my mother had a three
months' leave from exile, which she was
spending in the house of her brother, and
friends and relations were coming from far
and near to do her honour. It is incon-
ceivable that Mr. Nicholas B. should not

119

SOME REMINISCENCES

have been of the number. The Httle child
a few months old he had taken up in his
arms on the day of his home-coming after
years of war and exile was confessing her
faith in national salvation by suffering exile
in her turn. I do not know whether he
was present on the very day of our depar-
ture. I have already admitted that for me
he is more especially the man who in his
youth had eaten roast dog in the depths
of a gloomy forest of snow-loaded pines.
My memory cannot place him in any re-
membered scene. A hooked nose, some sleek
white hair, an unrelated evanescent im-
pression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure
militarily buttoned up to the throat, is all
that now exists on earth of Mr. Nicholas
B. ; only this vague shadow pursued by
the memory of his grand-nephew, the last
surviving human being, I suppose, of all
those he had seen in the course of his
taciturn life.

But I remember well the day of our de-
parture back to exile. The elongated,
lizarre, shabby travelling-carriage with four
post-horses, standing before the long front
of the house with its eight columns, four
on each side of the broad flight of stairs.
120

SOME REMINISCENCES

On the steps, groups of servants, a few
relations, one or two friends from the
nearest neighbourhood, a perfect silence, on
all the faces an air of sober concentration ;
my grandmother all in black gazing stoically,
my uncle giving his arm to my mother
down to the carriage in which I had been
placed already ; at the top of the flight
my little cousin in a short skirt of a tartan
pattern with a deal of red in it, and like a
small princess attended by the women of
her own household : the head gouvernante,
our dear, corpulent Francesca (who had
been for thirty years in the service of the
B. family), the former nurse, now outdoor
attendant, a handsome peasant face wear-
ing a compassionate expression, and the
good, ugly Mile. Durand, the governess,
with her black eyebrows meeting over
a short thick nose and a complexion like
pale brown paper. Of all the eyes turned
towards the carriage, her good-natured eyes
only were dropping tears, and it was
her sobbing voice alone that broke the
silence with an appeal to me : " N^oublie
pas ton Jraufais, mon cheri.'^ In three
months, simply by playing with us, she
had taught me not only to speak French

121

SOME REMINISCENCES

but to read it as well. She was indeed an
excellent playmate. In the distance, half-
way down to the great gates, a light, open
trap, harnessed with three horses in Russian
fashion, stood drawn up on one side with
the police-captain of the district sitting in
it, the vizor of his flat cap with a red band
pulled down over his eyes.

It seems strange that he should have
been there to watch our going so carefully.
Without wishing to treat with levity the
just timidities of Imperialists all the world
over, I may allow myself the reflection
that a woman, practically condemned by
the doctors, and a small boy not quite six
years old could not be regarded as seriously
dangerous even for the largest of conceiv-
able empires saddled with the most sacred
of responsibilities. And this good man, I
believe, did not think so either.

I learned afterwards why he was present
on that day. I don't remember any outward
signs, but it seems that, about a month
before, my mother became so unwell that
there was a doubt whether she could be
made fit to travel in the time. In this un-
certainty the Governor-General in Kiev was
petitioned to grant her a fortnight's exten-
122

SOME REMINISCENCES

sion of stay in her brother's house. No
answer whatever was returned to this prayer,
but one day at dusk the poHce-captain of
the district drove up to the house and told
my uncle's valet, who ran out to meet him,
that he wanted to speak with the master
in private, at once. Very much impressed
(he thought it was going to be an arrest)
the servant, " more dead than alive with
fright," as he related afterwards, smuggled
him through the big drawing-room, which
was dark (that room was not lighted every
evening), on tiptoe, so as not to attract
the attention of the ladies in the house,
and led him by way of the orangery to
my uncle's private apartments.

The policeman, without any prelimi-
naries, thrust a paper into my uncle's hands.

" There. Pray read this. I have no
business to show this paper to you. It is
wrong of me. But I can't either eat or
sleep with such a job hanging over me."

That police-captain, a native of Great
Russia, had been for many years serving
in the district.

My uncle unfolded and read the document.
It was a service order issued from the
Governor-General's secretariat, dealing with

123

SOME REMINISCENCES

the matter of the petition and directing
the police-captain to disregard all remon-
strances and explanations in regard to that
illness either from medical men or others,
" and if she has not left her brother's
house " — it went on to say — " on the morn-
ing of the day specified on her permit,
you are to despatch her at once under
escort, direct " (underlined) " to the prison-
hospital in Kiev, where she will be treated
as her case demands."

"For God's sake, Mr. B., see that your
sister goes away punctually on that day.
Don't give me this work to do with a woman
— and with one of your family too. I simply
cannot bear to think of it."

He was absolutely wringing his hands.
My uncle looked at him in silence.

" Thank you for this warning. I assure
you that even if she were dying she would
be carried out to the carriage."

" Yes — indeed — and what difference would
it make — travel to Kiev or back to her
husband. For she would have to go —
death or no death. And mind, Mr. B.,
I will be here on the day, not that I doubt
your promise, but because I must. I have
got to. Duty. All the same my trade is
124

SOME REMINISCENCES

not fit for a dog since some of you Poles
will persist in rebelling, and all of you have
got to suffer for it."

This is the reason why he was there in an
open three-horse trap pulled up between
the house and the great gates. I regret
not being able to give up his name to the
scorn of all believers in the rights of con-
quest, as a reprehensibly sensitive guardian
of Imperial greatness. On the other hand,
I am in a position to state the name of
the Governor-General who signed the order
with the marginal note "to be carried out
to the letter " in his own handwriting.
The gentleman's name was Bezak. A high
dignitary, an energetic official, the idol for
a time of the Russian Patriotic Press.

Each generation has its memories.

125

IV

It must not be supposed that in setting
forth the memories of this half-hour between
the moment my uncle left my room till we
met again at dinner, I am losing sight of
" Almayer's Folly." Having confessed that
my first novel was begun in idleness — a
holiday task — I think I have also given the
impression that it was a much-delayed book.
It was never dismissed from my mind,
even when the hope of ever finishing it was
very faint. Many things came in its way :
(daily duties, new impressions, old memories.

^ It was not the outcome of a need — the
famous need of self-expression which artists
find in their search for motives. The
necessity which impelled me was a hidden,
obscure necessity, a completely masked and

\janaccountable phenomenon. Or perhaps
some idle and frivolous magician (there
must be magicians in London) had cast a
spell over me through his parlour window
as I explored the maze of streets east and
west in solitary leisurely walks without
126

SOME REMINISCENCES

chart and compass. Till I began to writeA
that novel I had written nothing but letters
and not very many of these. I never made
a note of a fact, of an impression or of an
anecdote in my life. The conception of a
planned book was entirely outside my mental
range when I sat down to write ; the am-
bition of being an author had never
turned up amongst these gracious imaginary
existences one creates fondly for oneself
at times in the stillness and immobility of
a day-dream : yet it stands clear as the sun J
at noonday that from the moment I had
done blackening over the first manuscript
page of " Almayer's Folly " (it contained
about two hundred words and this pro-
portion of words to a page has remained
with me through the fifteen years of my
writing life), from the moment I had, in
the simplicity of my heart and the amazing
ignorance of my mind, written that page
the die was cast. Never had Rubicon been
more blindly forded, without invocation to j
the gods, without fear of men. —

That morning I got up from my breakfast,
pushing the chair back, and rang the bell
violently, or perhaps I should say resolutely,
or perhaps I should say eagerly, I do not

127

SOME REMINISCENCES

know. But manifestly it must have been
a special ring of the bell, a common sound
made impressive, like the ringing of a bell
for the raising of the curtain upon a new
scene. It was an unusual thing for me to
do. Generally, I dawdled over my breakfast
and I seldom took the trouble to ring the
bell for the table to be cleared away ;
but on that morning for some reason hidden
in the general mysteriousness of the event
I did not dawdle. And yet I was not in a
hurry. I pulled the cord casually and while
the faint tinkling somewhere down in the
basement went on, I charged my pipe in the
usual way and I looked for the matchbox
with glances distraught indeed but exhibiting,
I am ready to swear, no signs of a fine
frenzy. I was composed enough to perceive
after some considerable time the matchbox
lying there on the mantelpiece right under
my nose. And all this was beautifully and
safely usual. Before I had thrown down
the match my landlady's daughter appeared
with her calm, pale face and an inquisitive
look, in the doorway. Of late it was the
landlady's daughter who answered my bell.
I mention this little fact with pride, because
it proves that during the thirty or forty
128

SOME REMINISCENCES

days of my tenancy I had produced a
favourable impression. For a fortnight
past I had been spared the unattractive
sight of the domestic slave. The girls in
that Bessborough Gardens house were often
changed, but whether short or long, fair or
dark, they were always untidy and par-
ticularly bedraggled as if in a sordid version
of the fairy tale the ashbin cat had been
changed into a maid. I was infinitely
sensible of the privilege of being waited on
by my landlady's daughter. She was neat
if anaemic.

" Will you please clear away all this at
once ? " I addressed her in convulsive ac-
cents, being at the same time engaged in
getting my pipe to draw. This, I admit,
was an unusual request. Generally on getting
up from breakfast I would sit down in the
window with a book and let them clear
the table when they liked ; but if you
think that on that morning I was in the
least impatient, you are mistaken. I re-
member that I was perfectly calm. As a
matter of fact I was not at all certain that
I wanted to write, or that I meant to write,
or that I had anything to write about.
No, I was not impatient. I lounged between

I 129

SOME REMINISCENCES

the mantelpiece and the window, not even
consciously waiting for the table to be
cleared. It was ten to one that before my
landlady's daughter was done I would pick
up a book and sit down with it all the
morning in a spirit of enjoyable indolence.
I affirm it with assurance, and I don't even
know now what were the books then lying
about the room. Whatever they were they
were not the works of great masters, where
the secret of clear thought and exact ex-
pression can be found. Since the age of
five I have been a great reader, as is not
perhaps wonderful in a child who was never
aware of learning to read. At ten years of
age I had read much of Victor Hugo and
other romantics. I had read in Polish and
in French, history, voyages, novels ; I
knew " Gil Bias " and " Don Quixote " in
abridged editions; I had read in early
boyhood Polish poets and some French
poets, but I cannot say what I read on
the evening before I began to write my-
self. I believe it was a novel and it is
quite possible that it was one of Anthony
TroUope's novels. It is very likely. My
acquaintance with him was then very recent.
He is one of the English novelists whose
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SOME REMINISCENCES

works I read for the first time in English.
With men of European reputation, with
Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray,
it was otherwise. My first introduction to
English imaginative literature was " Nicholas
Nickleby." It is extraordinary how well
Mrs. Nicklebv could chatter disconnectedly
in Polish and the sinister Ralph rage in
that language. As to the Crummies family
and the family of the learned Squeers it
seemed as natural to them as their native
speech. It was, I have no doubt, an excellent
translation. This must have been in the
year '70. But I really believe that I am
wrong. That book was not my first intro-
duction to English literature. My first ac-
quaintance was (or were) the " Two Gentle-
men of Verona," and that in the very MS.
of my father's translation. It was during
our exile in Russia, a^id it must have been
less than a year after my mother's death,
because I remember myself in the black
blouse with a white border of my heavy
mourning. We were living together, quite
alone, in a small house on the outskirts of the

town of T . That afternoon, instead of

going out to play in the large yard which
we shared with our landlord, I had lingered

131

SOME REMINISCENCES

in the room in which my father generally
wrote. What emboldened me to clamber
into his chair I am sure I don't know,
but a couple of hours afterwards he dis-
covered me kneeling in it with my elbows
on the table and my head held in both hands
over the MS. of loose pages. I was greatly
confused, expecting to get into trouble.
He stood in the doorway looking at me with
some surprise, but the only thing he said
after a moment of silence was :

" Read the page aloud."

Luckily the page lying before me was not
overblotted with erasures and corrections,
and my father's handwriting was otherwise
extremely legible. When I got to the end
he nodded and I flew out of doors thinking
myself lucky to have escaped reproof for
that piece of impulsive audacity. I have
tried to discover since the reason of this
mildness, and I imagine that all unknown
to myself I had earned, in my father's
mind, the right to some latitude in my
relations with his writing-table. It was
only a month before, or perhaps it was
only a week before, that I had read to him
aloud from beginning to end, and to his
perfect satisfaction, as he lay on his bed,
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SOME REMINISCENCES

not being very well at the time, the proofs
of his translation of Victor Hugo's " Toilers
of the Sea." Such was my title to con-
sideration, I believe, and also my first
introduction to the sea in literature. If
I do not remember where, how and when I
learned to read, I am not likely to forget
the process of being trained in the art
of reading aloud. My poor father, an
admirable reader himself, was the most
exacting of masters. I reflect proudly that
I must have read that page of " Two
Gentlemen of Verona " tolerably well at
the age of eight. The next time I met them
was in a 5s. one-volume edition of the
dramatic works of William Shakespeare,
read in Falmouth, at odd moments of the
day, to the noisy accompaniment of caulkers'
mallets driving oakum into the deck-seams
of a ship in dry dock. We had run in,
in a sinking condition and with the crew
refusing duty after a month of weary
battling with the gales of the North Atlantic.
Books are an integral part of one's life
and my Shakespearean associations are with
that first year of our bereavement, the last
I spent with my father in exile (he sent
me away to Poland to my mother's brother

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SOME REMINISCENCES

directly he could brace himself up for the
separation), and with the year of hard
gales, the year in which I came nearest to
death at sea, first by water and then by
fire.

Those things I remember, but what I
was reading the day before my writing
life began I have forgotten. I have only
a vague notion that it might have been one
of Trollope's political novels. And I re-
member, too, the character of the day.
It was an autumn day with an opaline
atmosphere, a veiled, semi-opaque, lustrous
day, with fiery points and flashes of red
sunlight on the roofs and windows opposite,
while the trees of the square with all their
leaves gone were like tracings of Indian
ink on a sheet of tissue paper. It was one of
those London days that have the charm of
mysterious amenity, of fascinating softness.
The effect of opaline mist was often repeated
at Bessborough Gardens on account of the
nearness to the river.

There is no reason why I should remember
that effect more on that day than on any
other day, except that I stood for a long time
looking out of the window after the land-
lady's daughter was gone with her spoil of
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SOME REMINISCENCES

cups and saucers. I heard her put the
tray down in the passage and finally shut
the door ; and still I remained smoking
with my back to the room. It is very clear
that I was in no haste to take the plunge
into my writing life, if as plunge this first
attempt may be described. My whole
being was steeped deep in the indolence
of a sailor away from the sea, the scene of
never-ending labour and of unceasing duty.
For utter surrender to indolence you cannot
beat a sailor ashore when that mood is on
him, the mood of absolute irresponsibility
tasted to the full. It seems to me that I
thought of nothing whatever, but this is
an impression which is hardly to be believed
at this distance of years. What I am certain
of is, that I was very far from thinking of
writing a story, though it is possible and
even likely that I was thinking of the man
Almayer.

I had seen him for the first time some
four years before from the bridge of a
steamer moored to a rickety little wharf
forty miles up, more or less, a Bornean
river. It was very early morning and a
slight mist, an opaline mist as in Bessborough
Gardens only without the fiery flicks on

|135

SOME REMINISCENCES

roof and chimney-pot from the rays of the
red London sun, promised to turn presently
into a woolly fog. Barring a small dug-out
canoe on the river there was nothing moving
within sight. I had just come up yawning
from my cabin. The serang and the Malay
crew were overhauling the cargo chains
and trying the winches ; their voices sounded
subdued on the deck below and their move-
ments were languid. That tropical day-
break was chilly. The Malay quartermaster,
coming up to get something from the lockers
on the bridge, shivered visibly. The forests
above and below and on the opposite bank
looked black and dank ; wet dripped from
the rigging upon the tightly stretched deck
awnings, and it was in the middle of a
shuddering yawn that I caught sight of
Almayer. He was moving across a patch of
burnt grass, a blurred shadowy shape with
the blurred bulk of a house behind him, a
low house of mats, bamboos and palm-leaves
with a high-pitched roof of grass.

He stepped upon the jetty. He was
clad simply in flapping pyjamas of cretonne
pattern (enormous flowers with yellow petals
on a disagreeable blue ground) and a thin
cotton singlet with short sleeves. His arms,
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SOME REMINISCENCES

bare to the elbow, were crossed on his
chest. His black hair looked as if it had
not been cut for a very long time and a
curly wisp of it strayed across his forehead.
I had heard of him at Singapore ; I had
heard of him on board ; I had heard of
him early in the morning and late at night ;
I had heard of him at tiffm and at dinner ;
I had heard of him in a place called Pulo
Laut from a half-caste gentleman there,
who described himself as the manager of a
coal-mine ; which sounded civilised and pro-
gressive till you heard that the mine could
not be worked at present because it was
haunted by some particularly atrocious
ghosts. I had heard of him in a place
called Dongola, in the Island of Celebes,
when the Rajah of that little-known seaport
(you can get no anchorage there in less
than fifteen fathom, which is extremely
inconvenient) came on board in a friendly
way with only two attendants, and drank
bottle after bottle of soda-water on the
after-skylight with my good friend and

commander. Captain C . At least I

heard his name distinctly pronounced several
times in a lot of talk in Malay language.
Oh yes, I heard it quite distinctly — Almayer,

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SOME REMINISCENCES

Almayer — and saw Captain C smile

while the fat dingy Rajah laughed audibly.
To hear a Malay Rajah laugh outright is
a rare experience I can assure you. And I
overheard more of Almayer's name amongst
our deck passengers (mostly wandering
traders of good repute) as they sat all over
the ship — each man fenced round with
bundles and boxes — on mats, on pillows,
on quilts, on billets of wood, conversing of
Island affairs. Upon my word, I heard
the mutter of Almayer's name faintly at
midnight, while making my way aft from
the bridge to look at the patent taffrail-
log tinkling its quarter-miles in the great
silence of the sea. I don't mean to say
that our passengers dreamed aloud of Al-
mayer, but it is indubitable that two of them
at least, who could not sleep apparently
and were trying to charm away the trouble
of insomnia by a little whispered talk at
that ghostly hour, were referring in some
way or other to Almayer. It was really im-
possible on board that ship to get away
definitely from Almayer ; and a very small
pony tied vip forward and whisking its tail
inside the galley, to the great embarrassment
of our Chinaman cook, was destined for
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SOME REMINISCENCES

Almayer. What he wanted with a pony
goodness only knows, since I am perfectly
certain he could not ride it ; but here you
have the man, ambitious, aiming at the
grandiose, importing a pony, whereas in
the whole settlement at which he used to
shake daily his impotent fist, there was
only one path that was practicable for a
pony : a quarter of a mile at most, hedged
in by hundreds of square leagues of virgin
forest. But who knows ? The importation
of that Bali pony might have been part of
some deep schem.e, of some diplomatic plan,
of some hopeful intrigue. With Almayer one
could never tell. He governed his conduct
by considerations removed from the obvious,
by incredible assumptions, which rendered
his logic impenetrable to any reasonable
person. I learned all this later. That morning
seeing the figure in pyjamas moving in the
mist I said to myself : " That's the man."

He came quite close to the ship's side
and raised a harassed countenance, round
and flat, with that curl of black hair
over the forehead and a heavy, pained
glance.

" Good morning."

" Good morning."

139

SOME REMINISCENCES

He looked hard at me : I was a new
face, having just replaced the chief mate
he was accustomed to see ; and I think
that this novelty inspired him, as things
generally did, with deep-seated mistrust.

" Didn't expect you in till this evening,"
he remarked suspiciously.

I don't know why he should have been
aggrieved, but he seemed to be. I took
pains to explain to him that having picked
up the beacon at the mouth of the river
just before dark and the tide serving.

Captain C was enabled to cross the

bar and there was nothing to prevent him
going up the river at night.

" Captain C knows this river like

his own pocket," I concluded discursively,
trying to get on terms.

" Better," said Almayer.

Leaning over the rail of the bridge I
looked at Almayer, who looked down at the
wharf in aggrieved thought. He shuffled
his feet a little ; he wore straw slippers
with thick soles. The morning fog had
thickened considerably. Everything round
us dripped : the derricks, the rails, every
single rope in the ship — as if a fit of crying
had come upon the universe.
140

SOME REMINISCENCES

Almayer again raised his head and in
the accents of a man accustomed to the
buffets of evil fortune asked hardly audibly :

" I suppose you haven't got such a thing
as a pony on board ? "

I told him almost in a whisper, for he
attuned my communications to his minor key,
that we had such a thing as a pony, and I
hinted, as gently as I could, that he was
confoundedly in the way too. I was very
anxious to have him landed before I began to
handle the cargo. Almayer remained looking
up at me for a long while with incredulous
and melancholy eyes as though it were not
a safe thing to believe my statement. This
pathetic mistrust in the favourable issue
of any sort of affair touched me deeply,
and I added :

" He doesn't seem a bit the worse for
the passage. He's a nice pony too."

Almayer was not to be cheered up ;
for all answer he cleared his throat and
looked down again at his feet. I tried to
close with him on another tack.

" By Jove ! " I said. " Aren't you afraid
of catching pneumonia or bronchitis or
something, walking about in a singlet in
such a wet fog ? "

141

SOME REMINISCENCES

He was not to be propitiated by a show
of interest in his health. His answer was
a sinister " No fear," as much as to say
that even that way of escape from in-
clement fortune was closed to him.

" I just came down . . . " he mumbled
after a while.

" Well then, now you're here I will land
that pony for you at once and you can
lead him home. I really don't want him on
deck. He's in the way."

Almayer seemed doubtful. I insisted :

" Why, I will just swing him out and
land him on the wharf right in front of
you. I'd much rather do it before the
hatches are off. The little devil may jump
down the hold or do some other deadly
thing."

" There's a halter ? " postulated Almayer.

" Yes, of course there's a halter." And
without waiting any more I leaned over the
bridge rail.

" Serang, land Tuan Almayer's pony."

The cook hastened to shut the door of
the galley and a moment later a great
scuffle began on deck. The pony kicked
with extreme energy, the kalashes skipped
out of the way, the serang issued many
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SOME REMINISCENCES

orders in a cracked voice. Suddenly the
pony leaped upon the fore-hatch. His little
hoofs thundered tremendously ; he plunged
and reared. He had tossed his mane and
his forelock into a state of amazing wildness,
he dilated his nostrils, bits of foam flecked his
broad little chest, his eyes blazed. He was
something under eleven hands ; he was
fierce, terrible, angry, warlike, he said ha !
ha ! distinctly, he raged and thumped —
and sixteen able-bodied kalashes stood round
him like disconcerted nurses round a spoilt
and passionate child. He whisked his tail
incessantly ; he arched his pretty neck ;
he was perfectly delightful ; he was charm-
ingly naughty. There was not an atom of
vice in that performance ; no savage baring
of teeth and laying back of ears. On the
contrary, he pricked them forward in a
comically aggressive manner. He was totally
unmoral and lovable ; I would have liked
to give him bread, sugar, carrots. But life
is a stern thing and the sense of duty the
only safe guide. So I steeled my heart and
from my elevated position on the bridge I
ordered the men to fling themselves upon
him in a body.

The elderly serang, emitting a strange

143

SOME REMINISCENCES

inarticulate cry, gave the example. He
was an excellent petty officer — very com-
petent indeed, and a moderate opium smoker.
The rest of them in one great rush smothered
that pony. They hung on to his ears, to his
mane, to his tail ; they lay in piles across
his back, seventeen in all. The carpenter,
seizing the hook of the cargo-chain, flung him-
self on the top of them. A very satisfactory
petty officer too, but he stuttered. Have
you ever heard a light-yellow, lean, sad,
earnest Chinaman stutter in pidgin-English ?
It's very weird indeed. He made the eigh-
teenth. I could not see the pony at all ; but
from the swaying and heaving of that heap
of men I knew that there was something
alive inside.

From the wharf Almayer hailed in quaver-
ing tones :

" Oh, I say ! "

Where he stood he could not see what
was going on on deck unless perhaps the
tops of the men's heads ; he could only hear
the scuffle, the mighty thuds, as if the ship
were being knocked to pieces. I looked over :
" What is it ? "

" Don't let them break his legs," he
entreated me plaintively.
144

SOME REIMINISCENCES

(;

Oh, nonsense ! He's all right now. He
can't move."

By that time the cargo-chain had been
hooked to the broad canvas belt round the
pony's body, the kalashes sprang off simul-
taneously in all directions, rolling over each
other, and the worthy serang, making a
dash behind the winch, turned the steam

on.

Steady ! " I yelled, in great apprehension
of seeing the animal snatched up to the
very head of the derrick.

On the wharf Almayer shuffled his
straw slippers uneasily. The rattle of
the winch stopped, and in a tense, impres-
sive silence that pony began to swing across
the deck.

How limp he was ! Directly he felt himself
in the air he relaxed every muscle in a
most wonderful manner. His four hoofs
knocked together in a bunch, his head hung
down, and his tail remained pendent in a
nerveless and absolute immobility. He re-
minded me vividly of the pathetic little sheep
which hangs on tlie collar of the Order of the
Golden Fleece. I had no idea that anything
in the shape of a horse could be so limp as
that, either living or dead. His wild mane

K 145

SOME REMINISCENCES

hung down lumpily, a mere mass of inani-
mate horsehair ; his aggressive ears had
collapsed, but as he went swaying slowly
across the front of the bridge I noticed an
astute gleam in his dreamy, half-closed eye.
A trustworthy quartermaster, his glance
anxious and his mouth on the broad grin,
was easing over the derrick watchfully. I
superintended, greatly interested.

'' So ! That will do."

The derrick-head stopped. The kalashes
lined the rail. The rope of the halter hung
perpendicular and motionless like a bell-pull
in front of Almayer. Everything was very
still. I suggested amicably that he should
catch hold of the rope and mind what he w^as
about. He extended a provokingly casual
and superior hand.

" Look out then ! Lower away ! "

Almayer gathered in the rope intelligently
enough, but when the pony's hoofs touched
the wharf he gave way all at once to a
most foolish optimism. Without pausing,
without thinking, almost without looking,
he disengaged the hook suddenly from the
sling, and the cargo-chain, after hitting the
pony's quarters, swungback against the ship's
side with a noisy, ratthng slap. I suppose
146

SOME REMINISCENCES

I must have blinked. I know I missed some-
thing, because the next thing I saw was
Almayer lying flat on his back on the
jetty. He was alone.

Astonishment deprived me of speech long
enough to give Almayer time to pick himself
up in a leisurely and painful manner. The
kalashes lining the rail had all their mouths
open. The mist flew in the light breeze,
and it had come over quite thick enough
to hide the shore completely.

" How on earth did you manage to let
him get away ? " I asked scandalised.

Almayer looked into the smarting palm
of his right hand, but did not answer my
inquiry.

" Where do you think he will get to ? "
I cried. " Are there any fences anywhere
in this fog ? Can he bolt into the forest ?
What's to be done now ? "

Almayer shrugged his shoulders.

" Some of my men are sure to be about.
They will get hold of him sooner or
later."

" Sooner or later ! That's all very fine,
but what about my canvas sling — he's carried
it off. I want it now, at once, to land
two Celebes cows."

147

SOME REMINISCENCES

Since Dongola we had on board a pair
of the pretty httle island cattle in addition
to the pony. Tied up on the other side of
the fore deck they had been whisking their
tails into the other door of the galley. These
cows were not for Almayer, however ; they
were invoiced to Abdullah bin Selim, his
enemy. Almayer 's disregard of my require-
ments was complete.

" If I were you I would try to find out
where he's gone," I insisted. " Hadn't you
better call your men together or something ?
He will throw himself down and cut his
knees. He may even break a leg, you
know."

But Almayer, plunged in abstracted
thought, did not seem to want that pony
any more. Amazed at this sudden indiffer-
ence I turned all hands out on shore to
hunt for him on my own account, or, at
any rate, to hunt for the canvas sling
which he had round his body. The whole
crew of the steamer, with the exception of
firemen and engineers, rushed up the jetty
past the thoughtful Almayer and vanished
from my sight. The white fog swallowed
them up ; and again there was a deep
silence that seemed to extend for miles
148

SOME REMINISCENCES

up and down the stream. Still taciturn,
Almayer started to climb on board, and I
went down from the bridge to meet him on
the after deck.

" Would you mind telling the captain
that I want to see him very particularly ? '
he asked me in a low tone, letting his eyes
stray all over the place.

" Very well. I will go and see."

With the door of his cabin wide open

Captain C , just back from the bathroom,

big and broad-chested, was brushing his
thick, damp, iron-grey hair with two large
brushes.

" Mr. Almayer told me he wanted to see
you very particularly, sir."

Saying these words I smiled. I don't
know why I smiled except that it seemed
absolutely impossible to mention Almayer's
name without a smile of a sort. It had not
to be necessarily a mirthful smile. Turning

his head towards me Captain C smiled

too, rather joylessly.

" The pony got away from him —
eh?"

"Yes sir. He did."
" ^Vhere is he ? "

ii

Goodness only knows."

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SOME REMINISCENCES

" No. I mean Almayer. Let him come
along."

The captain's stateroom opening straight
on deck under the bridge, I had only to
beckon from the doorway to Almayer, who
had remained aft, with downcast eyes, on
the very spot where I had left him. He
strolled up moodily, shook hands and at
once asked permission to shut the cabin
door.

" I have a prett}^ story to tell you,"
were the last words I heard. The bitterness
of tone was remarkable.

I went away from the door, of course.
For the moment I had no crew on board ;
only the Chinaman carpenter, with a canvas
bag hung round his neck and a hammer in
his hand, roamed about the empty decks
knocking out the wedges of the hatches
and dropping them into the bag conscien-
tiously. Having nothing to do I joined our
two engineers at the door of the engine-room.
It was near breakfast time.

" He's turned up early, hasn't he ? "
commented the second engineer, and smiled
indifferently. He was an abstemious man
with a good digestion and a placid, reason-
able view of life even when hungry.
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SOME REMINISCENCES

" Yes," I said. " Shut up with the old
man. Some very particular business."

" He will spin him a damned endless
yarn," observed the chief engineer.

He smiled rather sourly. He was dyspeptic
and suffered from gnawing hunger in the
morning. The second smiled broadly, a
smile that made two vertical folds on his
shaven cheeks. And I smiled too, but I
was not exactly amused. In that man,
whose name apparently could not be uttered
anywhere in the Malay Archipelago without
a smile, there was nothing amusing what-
ever. That morning he breakfasted with
us silently, looking mostly into his cup.
I informed him that my men came upon
his pony capering in the fog on the very
brink of the eight-foot-deep well in which
he kept his store of guttah. The cover
was off with no one near by, and the
whole of my crew just missed going heels
over head into that beastly hole. Juru-
mudi Itam, our best quartermaster, deft
at fine needlework, he who mended the
ship's flags and sewed buttons on our coats,
was disabled by a kick on the shoulder.

Both remorse and gratitude seemed foreign
to Almayer's character. He mumbled :

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SOME REMINISCENCES

Do you mean that pirate fellow ? "
What pirate fellow ? The man has been
in the ship eleven years," I said indignantly.

" It's his looks," Almayer muttered for
all apology.

The sun had eaten up the fog. From
where Ave sat under the after awning we
could see in the distance the pony tied
up in front of Almayer's house, to a
post of the verandah. We were silent
for a long time. All at once Almayer,
alluding evidently to the subject of his
conversation in the captain's cabin, ex-
claimed anxiously across the table :

" I really don't know what I can do
now ! "

Captain C only raised his eyebrows

at him, and got up from his chair. We
dispersed to our duties, but Almayer, half-
dressed as he was in his cretonne pyjamas
and the thin cotton singlet, remained on
board, lingering near the gangway as though
he could not make up his mind whether
to go home or stay with us for good. Our
Chinamen boys gave him side glances as
they went to and fro ; and Ah Sing, our
young chief steward, the handsomest and
most sympathetic of Chinamen, catching
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SOME REMINISCENCES

my eye, nodded knowingly at his burly
back. In the course of the morning I ap-
proached him for a moment.

" Well, Mr. Almayer," I addressed him
easily, " you haven't started on your letters
yet."

We had brought him his mail and he
had held the bundle in his hand ever since
we got up from breakfast. He glanced at
it when I spoke and, for a moment, it
looked as if he were on the point of opening
his fingers and letting the whole lot fall
overboard. I believe he was tempted to
do so. I shall never forget that man afraid
of his letters.

" Have you been long out from Europe ? "
he asked me.

" Not very. Not quite eight months,"
I told him. " I left a ship in Samarang
with a hurt back and have been in the
hospital in Singapore some weeks."

He sighed.

" Trade is very bad here."

" Indeed ! "

" Hopeless ! . . . See these geese ? "

With the hand holding the letters he
pointed out to me what resembled a patch of
snow creeping and swaying across the distant

153

SOME REMINISCENCES

part of his compound. It disappeared behind
some bushes.

" The only geese on the East Coast,"
Ahnayer informed me in a perfunctory
mutter without a spark of faith, hope or
pride. Tiiereupon, with the same absence
of any sort of sustaining spirit he declared
his intention to select a fat bird and
send him on board for us not later than
next day.

I had heard of these largesses before.
He conferred a goose as if it were a sort of
Court decoration given only to the tried
friends of the house. I had expected more
pomp in the ceremony. The gift had surely
its special quality, multiple and rare. From
the only flock on the East Coast ! He did
not make half enough of it. That man did
not understand his opportunities. However,
I thanked him at some length.

" You see," he interrupted abruptly in a
very peculiar tone, " the worst of this
country is that one is not able to realise
. . . it's impossible to realise. ..." His
voice sank into a languid mutter. " And
when one has very large interests . . .
very important interests ..." he finished
faintly . . . " up the river."
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SOME REMINISCENCES

We looked at each other. He astonished
me by giving a start and making a very
queer grimace.

" Well, I must be off," he burst out
hurriedly. " So long ! "

At the moment of stepping over the
gangway he checked himself though, to
give me a mumbled invitation to dine at
his house that evening with my captain,
an invitation which I accepted. I don't
think it could have been possible for me to
refuse.

I like the worthy folk who will talk to
you of the exercise of free will "at any
rate for practical purposes." Free, is it ?
For practical purposes ! Bosh ! How could
I have refused to dine with that man ?
I did not refuse simply because I could not
refuse. Curiosity, a healthy desire for a
change of cooking, common civility, the
talk and the smiles of the previous twenty
days, every condition of my existence at
that moment and place made irresistibly
for acceptance ; and, crowning all that, there
was the ignorance, the ignorance, I say,
the fatal want of foreknowledge to counter-
balance these imperative conditions of the
problem. A refusal would have appeared

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perverse and insane. Nobody unless a
surly lunatic would have refused. But if I
had not got to know Almayer pretty well
it is almost certain there would never have
been a line of mine in print.

I accepted then — and I am paying yet
the price of my sanity. The possessor of
the only flock of geese on the East Coast
is responsible for the existence of some
fourteen volumes, so far. The number of
geese he had called into being under adverse
climatic conditions was considerably more
than fourteen. The tale of volumes will
never overtake the counting of heads, I
am safe to say ; but my ambitions point
not exactly that way, and whatever the pangs
the toil of writing has cost me I have always
thought kindly of Almayer.

I wonder, had he known anything of it,
what his attitude would have been ? This

something not to be discovered in this
world. But if we ever meet in the Elysian
Fields — where I cannot depict him to myself
otherwise than attended in the distance by
his flock of geese (birds sacred to Jupiter)
— and he addresses me in the stillness of
that passionless region, neither light nor dark-
ness, neither sound nor silence, and heaving
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SOME REMINISCENCES

endlessly with billowy mists from the im-
palpable multitudes of the swarming
dead, I think I know what answer to
make.

I would say, after listening courteously
to the unvibrating tone of his measured
remonstrances, which should not disturb, of
course, the solemn eternity of stillness in
the least — I would say something like
this :

" It is true, Almayer, that in the world
below I have converted your name to my
own uses. But that is a very small larceny.
_\\Tiat's in a name, O Shade ? If so much of
your old mortal weakness clings to you
yet as to make you feel aggrieved (it was
the note of your earthly voice, Almayer),
then, I entreat you, seek speech without delay
with our sublime fellow-Shade — with him
who, in his transient existence as a poet, com-
mented upon the smell of the rose. He will
comfort you. You came to me stripped of all
prestige by men's queer smiles and the dis-
respectful chjaiter of every vagrant trader in
the Islands. {Your name was the common
property of the winds : it, as it were, floated
naked over the waters about the Equator. I
wrapped round its unhonoured form the royal

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mantle of the tropics and have essayed to put
into the hollow sound the very anguish of
paternity — feats which you did not demand
from me — but remember that all the toil
and all the pain were mine. In your earthly
life you haunted me, Almayer. Consider
that this was taking a great liberty. Since
you were always complaining of being lost
to the world, you should remember that if
I had not believed enough in your existence
to let you haunt my rooms in Bessborough
Gardens, you would have been much more
lost. You affirm that had I been capable
of looking at you with a more perfect de-
tachment and a greater simplicity, I might
have perceived better the inward mar-
vellousness which, you insist, attended your
career upon that tiny pin-point of light,
hardly visible far, far below us, where both
our graves lie. No doubt ! But reflect, O
complaining Shade ! that this was not so
much my fault as your crowning misfortune.
I believed in you in the only way it was
possible for me to believe. It was not
worthy of your merits ? So be it. But you
were always an unlucky man, Almayer.
Nothing was ever quite worthy of you.
What made you so real to me was that you
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held this lofty theory with some force of
conviction and with an admirable con-
sistency."

It is with some such words translated
into the proper shadowy expressions that I
am prepared to placate Almayer in the
Elysian Abode of Shades, since it has come
to pass that having parted many years ago,
we are never to meet again in this world.

159

V

In the career of the most unhterary of
writers, in the sense that hterary ambition
had never entered the world of his imagina-
tion, the coming into existence of the first
book is quite an inexpUcable event. In
my own case I cannot trace it back to any
mental or psychological cause which one
could point out and hold to. The greatest
of my gifts being a consummate capacity
for doing nothing, I cannot even point to
boredom as a rational stimulus for taking
up a pen. The pen at any rate was there,
and there is nothing wonderful in that.
Everybody keeps a pen (the cold steel of
our days) in his rooms in this enlightened
age of penny stamps and halfpenny post-
cards. In fact, this was the epoch when by
means of postcard and pen Mr. Gladstone
had made the reputation of a novel or two.
And I too had a pen rolling about some-
where— the seldom-used, the reluctantly-
taken-up pen of a sailor ashore, the pen
rugged Avith the dried ink of abandoned
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attempts, of answers delayed longer than
decency permitted, of letters begun with
infinite reluctance and put off suddenly till
next day — till next week as likely as
not ! The neglected, uncared-for pen, flung
away at the slightest provocation, and
under the stress of dire necessity hunted
for without enthusiasm, in a perfunctory,
grumpy worry, in the " Where the devil is
the beastly thing gone to ? " ungracious
spirit. Where indeed ! It might have been
reposing behind the sofa for a day or so.
My landlady's anaemic daughter (as Ollen-
dorff would have expressed it), though
commendably neat, had a lordly, careless
manner of approaching her domestic duties.
Or it might even be resting delicately
poised on its point by the side of the table-
leg, and when picked up show a gaping,
inefficient beak which would have dis-
couraged any man of literary instincts. But
not me ! " Never mind. This will do."

O days without guile ! If anybody had
told me then that a devoted household,
having a generally exaggerated idea of
my talents and importance, would be put
into a state of tremor and flurry by the fuss
I would make because of a suspicion that

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somebody had touched my sacrosanct pen
of authorship, I would have never deigned
as much as the contemptuous smile of
unbelief. There are imaginings too unlikely
for any kind of notice, too wild for indulgence
itself, too absurd for a smile. Perhaps, had
that seer of the future been a friend, I
should have been secretly saddened. "Alas ! "
I would have thought, looking at him with
an unmoved face, " the poor fellow is going
mad."

I would have been, without doubt, sad-
dened ; for in this world where the jour-
nalists read the signs of the sky, and the
wind of heaven itself, blowing where it
listeth, does so under the prophetical man-
agement of the Meteorological Office, but
where the secret of human hearts cannot
be captured either by prying or praying,
it was infinitely more likely that the sanest
of my friends should nurse the germ of
incipient madness than that I should turn
into a writer of tales.

To survey with wonder the changes of
one's own self is a fascinating pursuit for
idle hours. The field is so wide, the surprises
so varied, the subject so full of unprofitable
but curious hints as to the work of unseen
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forces, that one does not weary easily of it,
I am not speaking here of megalomaniacs
who rest uneasy under the crown of their
unbounded conceit — who really never rest in
this world, and when out of it go on fretting
and fuming on the straitened circumstances
of their last habitation, where all men must
lie in obscure equality. Neither am I
thinking of those ambitious minds who,
always looking forward to some aim of
aggrandisement, can spare no time for a
detached, impersonal glance upon them-
selves.

And that's a pity. They are unlucky.
These two kinds, together with the much
larger band of the totally unimaginative,
of those unfortunate beings in whose empty
and unseeing gaze (as a great French writer
has put it) " the whole universe vanishes
into blank nothingness," miss, perhaps,
the true task of us men whose day is
short on this earth, the abode of conflicting
opinions. VThe ethical view of the uni-
verse involves us at last in so many
cruel and absurd contradictions, where
the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity,
and even of reason itself, seem ready
to perish, that I have come to suspect that

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the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.
I would fondly believe that its object is
purely spectacular : a spectacle for awe,
love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in
this view — and in this view alone — never for
despair ! Those visions, delicious or poignant,
are a moral end in themselves. The rest is
our affair — the laughter, the tears, the ten-
derness, the indignation, the high tran-
quillity of a steeled heart, the detached
curiosity of a subtle mind — that's our affair !
And the unwearied self -forgetful attention
to every phase of the living universe re-
flected in our consciousness may be our
appointed task on this earth. A task in
which fate has perhaps engaged nothing
of us except our conscience, gifted with a
voice in order to bear true testimonv to
the visible wonder, the haunting terror,
the infinite passion and the illimitable
serenity; to the supreme law and the abiding
mystery of the sublime spectacle. |

Chi lo sa ? It mav be true. In this view
there is room for every religion except for
the inverted creed of impiety, the mask
and cloak of arid despair; for every joy
and every sorrow, for every fair dream,
for every charitable hope. The great aim is
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SOME REMINISCENCES

to remain true to the emotions called out
of the deep encircled by the firmament of
stars, whose infinite numbers and awful
distances may move us to laughter or tears
(was it the Walrus or the Carpenter, in tlie
poem, who '' wept to see such quantities
of sand " ?), or, again, to a properly steeled
heart, may matter nothing at all.

The casual quotation, which had suggested
itself out of a poem full of merit, leads i^^-..
to remark that in the conception of ap
purely spectacular universe, where inspira-
tion of every sort has a rational existence,
the artist of every kind finds a natural
place ; and amongst them the poet as the
seer par excellence. Even the writer of
prose, who in his less noble and more toil-
some task should be a man with the steeled
heart, is worthy of a place, providing he
looks on with undimmed eyes and keeps
laughter out of his voice, let who will laugh
or cry. Yes ! Even he, [the prose artist of
fiction, which after all is but truth often
dragged out of a well and clothed in the
painted robe of imaged phrases^even he
has his place amongst kings, demagogues,
priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes. Cabinet
Ministers, Fabians, bricklayers, apostles, ants,

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scientists, Kaffirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants,
lawyers, dandies, microbes and constellations
of a universe whose amazing spectacle is
a moral end in itself.

Here I perceive (speaking without offence)
the reader assuming a subtle expression,
as if the cat were out of the bag. I take
the novelist's freedom to observe the reader's
mind formulating the exclamation, " That's
it ! The fellow talks pro domo.^^

Indeed it was not the intention ! When
I shouldered the bag I was not aware of
the cat inside. But, after all, why not ?
The fair courtyards of the House of Art
are thronged by many humble retainers.
And there is no retainer so devoted as he
who is allowed to sit on the doorstep. The
fellows who have got inside are apt to
think too much of themselves. This last
•^. remark, I beg to state, is not malicious
within the definition of the law of libel.
It's fair comment on a matter of public
interest. But never mind. Pro domo. So
be it. For his house tant que vous voudrez.
And yet in truth I was by no means anxious
to justify my existence. The attempt would
have been not only needless and absurd,
but almost inconceivable, in a purely spec-
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SOME REMINISCENCES

tacular universe, where no such disagreeable
necessity can possibly arise. It is sufficient
for me to say (and I am saying it at some
length in these pages) : Tai vecu. I have
existed, obscure amongst the wonders
and terrors of my time, as the Abbe
Sieyes, the original utterer of the quoted
words, had managed to exist through
the violences, the crimes, and the enthu-
siasms of the French Revolution. Tai
vecu, as I apprehend most of us manage
to exist, missing all along the varied
forms of destruction by a hair's-breadth,
saving my body, that's clear, and perhaps
my soul also, but not without some damage
here and there to the fine edge of my con-
science, that heirloom of the ages, of the
race, of the group, of the family, colourable
and plastic, fashioned by the words, the
looks, the acts, and even by the silences
and abstentions surrounding one's childhood ;
tinged in a complete scheme of delicate
shades and crude colours by the inherited
traditions, beliefs, or prejudices — unaccount-
able, despotic, persuasive, and often, in its
texture, romantic.

And often romantic ! . . . The matter
in hand, however, is to keep these reminis-

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SOME REMINISCENCES

cences from turning into confessions, a form
of literary activity discredited by Jean
Jacques Rousseau on account of the extreme
thoroughness he brought to the work of
justifying his own existence ; for that such
was his purpose is palpably, even grossly,
visible to an anprejudiced eye. But then,
you see, the man was not a writer of fiction.
He was an artless moralist, as is clearly
demonstrated by his anniversaries being
celebrated with marked emphasis by the
heirs of the French Revolution, which was
not a political movement at all, but a great
outburst of morality. He had no imagina-
tion, as the most casual perusal of " ^mile "
will prove. He was no novelist, whose first
virtue is the exact understanding of the
limits traced by the reality of his time
to the play of his invention. Inspiration
comes from the earth, which has a past, a
history, a future, not from the cold and
immutable heaven. A writer of imaginative
prose (even more than any other sort of
artist) stands confessed in his works. His
conscience, his deeper sense of things, lawful
and unlawful, gives him his attitude before
the world. Indeed, every one who puts pen
to paper for the reading of strangers (unless
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SOME REMINISCENCES

a moralist, who, generally speaking, has
no conscience except the one he is at pains
to produce for the use of others) can speak
of nothing else. It is M. Anatole France,
the most eloquent and just of French prose
writers, who says that we must recognise
at last that, " failing the resolution to hold
our peace, we can only talk of ourselves." J

This remark, if I remember rightly, was
made in the course of a sparring match
with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the
principles and rules of literary criticism.
As was fitting for a man to whom we owe
the memorable saying, " The good critic
is he who relates the adventures of his soul
amongst masterpieces," M. Anatole France
maintained that there were no rules and
no principles. And that may be very true.
Rules, principles and standards die and
vanish every day. Perhaps they are all
dead and vanished by this time. These, if
ever, are the brave, free days of destroyed •
landmarks, while the ingenious minds are
busy inventing the forms of the new beacons
which, it is consoling to think, will be set
up presently in the old places. But what is
interesting to a writer is the possession of
an inward certitude that literary criticism

169

•4

SOME REMINISCENCES

will never die, for man (so variously defined)
is, before everything else, a critical animal.
And, as long as distinguished minds are
ready to treat it in the spirit of high adven-
ture, literary criticism shall appeal to us
with all the charm and wisdom of a well-
told tale of personal experience.

For Englishmen especially, of all the races
of the earth, a task, any task, undertaken
in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit
of romance. But the critics as a rule exhibit
but little of an adventurous spirit. They
take risks, of course — one can hardly live
without that. The daily bread is served
out to us (however sparingly) with a pinch
of salt. Otherwise one would get sick of
the diet one prays for, and that would be
not only improper, but impious. From
impiety of that or any other kind — save
us ! An ideal of reserved manner, adhered
to from a sense of proprieties, from shyness,
perhaps, or caution, or simply from weari-
ness, induces, I suspect, some writers of
criticism to conceal the adventurous side
of their calling, and then the criticism
becomes a mere " notice," as it were the
relation of a journey where nothing but the
distances and the geology of a new country
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SOME REMINISCENCES

should be set down ; the glimpses of strange
beasts, the dangers of flood and field, the
hair's-breadth escapes, and the sufferings
(oh, the sufferings too ! I have no doubt
of the sufferings) of the traveller being
carefully kept out ; no shady spot, no fruit-
ful plant being ever mentioned either; so
that the whole performance looks like a
mere feat of agility on the part of a trained
pen running in a desert. A cruel spectacle
— a most deplorable adventure. " Life,"
in the words of an immortal thinker of,
I should say, bucolic origin, but whose
perishable name is lost to the worship of
posterity — " life is not all beer and skittles."
Neither is the writing of novels. It isn't
really. Je vous donne ma parole dlionneur
that it — is — not. Not all. I am thus
emphatic because some years ago, I remem-
ber, the daughter of a general . . .

Sudden revelations of the profane w^orld
must have come now and then to hermits
in their cells, to the cloistered monks of
Middle Ages, to lonely sages, men of science,
reformers; the revelations of the world's
superficial judgment, shocking to the souls
concentrated upon their own bitter labour
in the cause of sanctity, or of knowledge,

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SOME REMINISCENCES

or of temperance, let us say, or of art,
if only the art of cracking jokes or playing
the flute. And thus this general's daughter
came to me — or I should say one of the
general's daughters did. There were three
of these bachelor ladies, of nicely graduated
ages, who held a neighbouring farmhouse
in a united and more or less military
occupation. The eldest warred against the
decay of manners in the village children,
and executed frontal attacks upon the village
mothers for the conquest of curtseys. It
sounds futile, but it was really a war for
an idea. The second skirmished and scouted
all over the country ; and it was that
one who pushed a reconnaissance right to
my very table — I mean the one who wore
stand-up collars. She was really calling
upon my wife in the soft spirit of after-
noon friendliness, but with her usual martial
determination. She marched into my room
swinging her stick . . . but no — I mustn't
exaggerate. It is not my speciality. I am
not a humoristic writer. In all soberness,
then, all I am certain of is that she had a
stick to swing.

No ditch or wall encompassed my abode.
The window was open ; the door too
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SOME REMINISCENCES

stood open to that best friend of my work,
the warm, still sunshine of the wide fields.
They lay around me infinitely helpful, but
truth to say I had not known for weeks
whether the sun shone upon the earth and
whether the stars above still moved on their
appointed courses. I was just then giving
up some days of my allotted span to the last
chapters of the novel "Nostromo," a tale of
an imaginary (but true) seaboard, which is
still mentioned now and again, and indeed
kindly, sometimes in connection with the
word " failure " and sometimes in conjunc-
tion with the word " astonishing.'* I have
no opinion on this discrepancy. It's the
sort of difference that can never be settled.
All I know is that, Tfor twenty months,
neglecting the common joys of life that
fall to the lot of the humblest on this
earth, I had, like the prophet of old,
*' wrestled with the Lord " for mv creation,
for the headlands of the coast, for the
darkness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the
snows, the clouds on the sky, and for the
breath of life that had to be blown into
the shapes of men and women, of Latin and
Saxon, of Jew and Gentile. / These are,
perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult

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to characterise otherwise the intimacy and
the strain of a creative effort in which mind
and will and conscience are engaged to the
full, hour after hour, day after day, away
from the world, and to the exclusion of all
that makes life really lovable and gentle —
something for which a material parallel can
only be found in the everlasting sombre
stress of the westward winter passage round
Cape Horn. For that too is the wrestling
of men with the might of their Creator, in
a great isolation from the world, without
the amenities and consolations of life, a
lonely struggle under a sense of over-
matched littleness, for no reward that could
be adequate, but for the mere winning
of a longitude. Yet a certain longitude,
once won, cannot be disputed. The sun
and the stars and the shape of your earth
are the witnesses of your gain ; whereas a
handful of pages, no matter how much you
have made them your own, are at best
but an obscure and questionable spoil. Here
they are. " Failure " — " Astonishing " :
take your choice ; or perhaps both, or
neither — a mere rustle and flutter of pieces
of paper settling down in the night, and
undistinguishable, like the snowflakes of a
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SOME REMINISCENCES

great drift destined to melt away in sun-
shine.

" How do you do ? "

It was the greeting of the general's
daughter. I had heard nothing — no rustle,
no footsteps. I had felt only a moment
before a sort of premonition of evil ; I had
the sense of an inauspicious presence — just
that much warning and no more ; and then
came the sound of the voice and the jar as
of a terrible fall from a great height — a
fall, let us say, from the highest of the
clouds floating in gentle procession over the
fields in the faint westerly air of that July
afternoon. I picked myself up quickly,
of course ; in other words, I jumped up
from my chair stunned and dazed, every
nerve quivering with the pain of being
uprooted out of one world and flung down
into another — perfectly civil.

" Oh ! How do you do ? Won't you sit
down ? "

That's what I said. This horrible but,
I assure you, perfectly true reminiscence
tells you more than a whole volume of
confessions a la Jean Jacques Rousseau
would do. Observe ! I didn't howl at her,
or start upsetting furniture, or throw myself

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SOME REMINISCENCES

on the floor and kick, or allow myself to
hint in any other way at the appalling
magnitude of the disaster. The whole
world of Costaguana (the country, you may
remember, of my seaboard tale), men,
women, headlands, houses, mountains, town,
campo (there was not a single brick, stone,
or grain of sand of its soil I had not placed
in position with my own hands) ; all the
history, geography, politics, finance ; the
wealth of Charles Gould's silver-mine, and
the splendour of the magnificent Capataz
de Cargadores, whose name, cried out in
the night (Dr. Monygham heard it pass
over his head — in Linda Viola's voice),
dominated even after death the dark gulf
containing his conquests of treasure and
love — all that had come down crashing
about my ears. I felt I could never pick
up the pieces — and in that very moment
I was saying, " Won't you sit down ? "

The sea is strong medicine. Behold what
the quarter-deck training even in a merchant
ship will do ! This episode should give you
a new view of the English and Scots seamen
(a much-caricatured folk) who had the last
say in the formation of my character. One
is nothing if not modest, but in this disaster
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SOME REMINISCENCES

I think I have done some honour to their
simple teaching. " Won't you sit down ? "
Very fair ; very fair indeed. She sat down.
Her amused glance strayed all over the
room. There were pages of MS. on the
table and under the table, a batch of
typed copy on a chair, single leaves had
fluttered away into distant corners ; there
were there living pages, pages scored and
wounded, dead pages that would be burnt
at the end of the day — the litter of a cruel
battlefield, of a long, long and desperate
fray. Long ! I suppose I went to bed
sometimes, and got up the same number
of times. Yes, I suppose I slept, and ate
the food put before me, and talked con-
nectedly to my household on suitable
occasions. But I had never been aware
of the even flow of daily life, made easy
and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful,
tireless affection. Indeed, it seemed to me
that I had been sitting at that table sur-
rounded by the litter of a desperate fray
for days and nights on end. It seemed so,
because of the intense weariness of which
that interruption had made me aware —
the awful disenchantment of a mind realising
suddenly the futility of an enormous task,

M 177

SOME REMINISCENCES

joined to a bodily fatigue such as no ordinary
amount of fairly heavy physical labour
could ever account for. I have carried
bags of wheat on my back, bent almost
double under a ship's deck-beams, from
six in the morning till six in the evening
(with an hour and a half off for meals), so
I ought to know.

And I love letters. I am jealous of their
honour and concerned for the dignity and
comeliness of their service. I was, most
likely, the only writer that neat lady had
ever caught in the exercise of his craft,
and it distressed me not to be able to
remember when it was that I dressed
myself last, and how. No doubt that would
be all right in essentials. The fortune of the
house included a pair of grey-blue watchful
eyes that would see to that. But I felt
somehow as grimy as a Costaguana lepero
after a day's fighting in the streets, rumpled
all over and dishevelled down to my very
heels. And I am afraid I blinked stupidly.
All this was bad for the honour of letters
and the dignity of their service. Seen
indistinctly through the dust of my collapsed
universe, the good lady glanced about the
room with a slightly amused serenity. And
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SOME REMINISCENCES

she was smiling. What on earth was she
smihng at ? She remarked casually :

" I am afraid I interrupted you."

'' Not at all."

She accepted the denial in perfect good
faith. And it was strictly true. Inter-
rupted— indeed ! She had robbed me of
at least twenty lives, each infinitely more
poignant and real than her own, because
informed with passion, possessed of con-
victions, involved in great affairs created
out of my own substance for an anxiously
meditated end.

She remained silent for a while, then said
with a last glance all round at the litter of
the fray :

*' And you sit like this here writing your
— your . . ."

" I— what ? Oh, yes ! I sit here all day."

" It must be perfectly delightful."

I suppose that, being no longer very
young, I might have been on the verge of
having a stroke ; but she had left her dog
in the porch, and my boy's dog, patrolling
the field in front, had espied him from
afar. He came on straight and swift like a
cannon-ball, and the noise of the fight,
which burst suddenly upon our ears, was

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SOME REMINISCENCES

more than enough to scare away a fit of
apoplexy. We went out hastily and separated
the gallant animals. Afterwards I told
the lady where she would find my wife —
just round the corner, under the trees.
She nodded and went off with her dog,
leaving me appalled before the death and
devastation she had lightly made — and with
the awfully instructive sound of the word
" delightful " lingering in my ears.

Nevertheless, later on, I duly escorted
her to the field gate. I wanted to be civil,
of course (what are twenty lives in a mere
novel that one should be rude to a lady
on their account ?), but mainly, to adopt
the good sound Ollendorffian style, because
I did not want the dog of the general's
daughter to fight again (encore) with the
faithful dog of my infant son (mon petit
garfon). — Was I afraid that the dog of the
general's daughter would be able to over-
come (vaincre) the dog of my child ? — No,
I was not afraid. . . . But away with the
Ollendorff method. However appropriate and
seemingly unavoidable when I touch upon
anything appertaining to the lady, it is
most unsuitable to the origin, character and
history of the dog ; for the dog was the
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SOME REMINISCENCES

gift to the child from a man for whom
words had anything but an Ollendorffian
vahie, a man almost childlike in the impulsive
movements of his untutored genius, the
most single-minded of verbal impressionists,
using his great gifts of straight feeling and
right expression with a fine sincerity and
a strong if, perhaps, not fully conscious
conviction. His art did not obtain, I fear,
all the credit its unsophisticated inspiration
deserved. I am alluding to the late Stephen
Crane, the author of " The Red Badge of
Courage," a work of imagination which
found its short moment of celebrity in the
last decade of the departed century. Other
books followed. Not many. He had not
the time. It was an individual and complete
talent, which obtained but a grudging,
somewhat supercilious recognition from the
world at large. For himself one hesitates
to regret his early death. Like one of the
men in his " Open Boat," one felt that he
was of those whom fate seldom allows to
make a safe landing after much toil and
bitterness at the oar. I confess to an abiding
affection for that energetic, slight, fragile,
intensely living and transient figure. He
liked me even before we met on the strength

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SOME REMINISCENCES

of a page or two of my writing, and after
we had met I am glad to think he liked me
still. He used to point out to me with
great earnestness, and even with some
severity, that " a boy ought to have a dog."
I suspect that he was shocked at my neglect
of parental duties. Ultimately it was he
who provided the dog. Shortly afterwards,
one day, after playing with the child on
the rug for an hour or so with the most
intense absorption, he raised his head and
declared firmly ; "I shall teach your boy
to ride." That was not to be. He was not
given the time.

But here is the dog — an old dog now.
Broad and low on his bandy paws, with a
black head on a white body and a ridi-
culous black spot at the other end of him,
he provokes, when he walks abroad, smiles
not altogether unkind. Grotesque and
engaging in the whole of his appearance,
his usual attitudes are meek, but his
temperament discloses itself unexpectedly
pugnacious in the presence of his kind.
As he lies in the firelight, his head well
up, and a fixed, far-away gaze directed
at the shadows of the room, he achieves
a striking nobility of pose in the calm
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consciousness of an unstained life. He has
brought up one baby, and now, after seeing
his first charge off to school, he is bringing
up another with the same conscientious
devotion, but with a more deliberate gravity
of manner, the sign of greater wisdom and
riper experience, but also of rheumatism,
I fear. From the morning bath to the
evening ceremonies of the cot you attend,
old friend, the little two-legged creature
of your adoption, being yourself treated
in the exercise of your duties with every
possible regard, with infinite consideration,
by every person in the house — even as
I myself am treated ; only you deserve it
more. The general's daughter would tell
you that it must be " perfectly delightful."

Aha ! old dog. She never heard you
yelp with acute pain (it's that poor left
ear) the while, with incredible self-com-
mand, you preserve a rigid immobility for
fear of overturning the little two-legged
creature. She has never seen your resigned
smile when the little two-legged creature,
interrogated sternly, " What are you doing
to the good dog ? " answers with a wide,
innocent stare : " Nothing. Only loving
him, mamma dear ! "

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The general's daughter does not know
the secret terms of self-imposed tasks, good
dog, the pain that may lurk in the very
rewards of rigid self-command. But we
have lived together many years. We have
grown older, too ; and though our work
is not quite done yet we may indulge now
and then in a little introspection before the
fire — meditate on the art of bringing up
babies and on the perfect delight of writing
tales where so many lives come and go
at the cost of one which slips imperceptibly
away.

184

VI

In the retrospect of a life which had, besides
its pretrminary stage of childhood and early
youth, two distinct developments, and even
two distinct elements, such as earth and
w^ater, for its successive scenes, a certain
amount of naiveness is unavoidable. I
am conscious of it in these pages. This
remark is put forward in no apologetic
spirit. As years go by and the number
of pages grows steadily, the feeling grows
upon one too that one can write only
for friends. Then why should one put
them to the necessity of protesting (as
a friend would do) that no apology is
necessary, or put, perchance, into their
heads the doubt of one's discretion ? So
much as to the care due to those friends
whom a word here, a line there, a fortunate
page of just feeling in the right place,
some happy simplicity, or even some lucky
subtlety, has drawn from the great multi-
tude of fellow-beings even as a fish is drawn
from the depths of the sea. Fishing is

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notoriously (I am talking now of the deep
sea) a matter of luck. As to one's enemies,
those will take care of themselves.

There is a gentleman, for instance, who,
metaphorically speaking, jumps upon me
with both feet. This image has no grace,
but it is exceedingly apt to the occasion —
to the several occasions. I don't know
precisely how long he had been indulging
in that intermittent exercise, whose seasons
are ruled by the custom of the publishing
trade. Somebody pointed him out (in
printed shape, of course) to my attention
some time ago, and straightway I experi-
enced a sort of reluctant affection for
that robust man. He leaves not a shred of
my substance untrodden ; for the writer's
substance is his writing ; the rest of him
is but a vain shadow, cherished or hated
on uncritical grounds. Not a shred ! Yet
the sentiment owned to is not a freak of
affectation or perversity. It has a deeper,
and, I venture to think, a more estimable
origin than the caprice of emotional law-
lessness. It is, indeed, lawful, in so much
that it is given (reluctantly) for a considera-
tion, for several considerations. There is
that robustness, for instance, so often the
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SOME REMINISCENCES

sign of good moral balance. That's a
consideration. It is not, indeed, pleasant
to be stamped upon, but the very thorough-
ness of the operation, implying not only
a careful reading, but some real insight
into work whose qualities and defects,
whatever they may be, are not so much
on the surface, is something to be thankful
for in view of the fact that it may happen
to one's work to be condemned without
being read at all. This is the most
fatuous adventure that can well happen
to a writer venturing his soul amongst
criticisms. It can do one no harm, of
course, but it is disagreeable. It is dis-
agreeable in the same way as discovering
a three-card-trick man amongst a decent
lot of folk in a third-class compartment.
The open impudence of the whole trans-
action, appealing insidiously to the folly
and credulity of mankind, the brazen,
shameless patter, proclaiming the fraud
openly while insisting on the fairness of the
game, give one a feeling of sickening disgust.
The honest violence of a plain man playing
a fair game fairly — even if he means to
knock you over — may appear shocking, but
it remains within the pale of decency.

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Damaging as it may be, it is in no sense
offensive. One may well feel some regard
for honesty, even if practised upon one's
own vile body. But it is very obvious that
an enemy of that sort will not be stayed
by explanations or placated by apologies.
Were I to advance the plea of youth in
excuse of the naiveness to be found in
these pages, he would be likely to say
" Bosh ! " in a column and a half of fierce
print. Yet a writer is no older than his
first published book, and, notwithstanding
the vain appearances of decay which attend
us in this transitory life, I stand here with
the wreath of only fifteen short summers
on my brow.

With the remark, then, that at such
tender age some naiveness of feeling
and expression is excusable, I proceed to
admit that, upon the whole, my previous
state of existence was not a good equip-
ment for a hterary life. Perhaps I should
not have used the word literary. That
word presupposes an intimacy of acquaint-
ance with letters, a turn of mind and a
manner of feeling to which I dare lay
no claim. I only love letters ; but the
love of letters does not make a literary
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man, any more than the love of the sea
makes a seaman. And it is very possible,
too, that I love the letters in the same
way a literary man may love the sea he
looks at from the shore — a scene of great
endeavour and of great achievements
changing the face of the world, the great
open way to all sorts of undiscovered
countries. No, perhaps I had better say
that the life at sea — and I don't mean a
mere taste of it, but a good broad span
of years, something that really counts as
real service — is not, upon the whole, a
good equipment for a writing life. God
forbid, though, that I should be thought
of as denying my masters of the quarter-
deck. 1 am not capable of that sort of
apostasy. I have confessed my attitude
of piety towards their shades in three or
four tales, and if any man on earth more
than another needs to be true to himself
as he hopes to be saved, it is certainly the
writer of fiction.

What I meant to say, simply, is that
the quarter-deck training does not prepare
one sufficiently for the reception of literary
criticism. Only that, and no more. But
this defect is not without gravity. If it be

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>y

permissible to twist, invert, adapt (and
spoil) M. Anatole France's definition of a
good critic, then let us say that the good
author is he who contemplates without
marked joy or excessive sorrow the adven-
tures of his soul amongst criticisms. Far
be from me the intention to mislead an
attentive public into the belief that there
is no criticism at sea. That would be dis-
honest, and even impolite. Everything can
be found at sea, according to the spirit
of your quest — strife, peace, romance,
naturalism of the most pronounced kind,
ideals, boredom, disgust, inspiration — and
every conceivable opportunity, including
the opportunity to make a fool of yourself
— exactly as in the pursuit of literature.
But the quarter-deck criticism is some-
what different from literary criticism. This
much they have in common, that before
the one and the other the answering back,
as a general rule, does not pay.

Yes, you find criticism at sea, and even
appreciation — I tell you everything is to be
found on salt water — criticism generally
impromptu, and always viva voce, which
is the outward, obvious difference from the
literary operation of that kind, with con-
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SOME REMINISCENCES

sequent freshness and vigour which may
be lacking in the printed word. With
appreciation, which comes at the end, when
the critic and the criticised are about to
part, it is otherwise. The sea appreciation
of one's humble talents has the permanency
of the written word, seldom the charm of
variety, is formal in its phrasing. There
the literary master has the superiority,
though he, too, can in effect but say —
and often says it in the very phrase — " I
can highly recommend." Only usually he
uses the word " We," there being some
occult virtue in the first person plural,
which makes it specially fit for critical and
royal declarations. I have a small handful
of these sea appreciations, signed by various
masters, yellowing slowly in my writing-
table's left-hand drawer, rustling under my
reverent touch, like a handful of dry leaves
plucked for a tender memento from the
tree of knowledge. Strange ! It seems
that it is for these few bits of paper, headed
by the names of a few ships and signed
by the names of a few Scots and English
shipmasters, that I have faced the astonished
indignations, the mockeries and the re-
proaches of a sort hard to bear for a boy

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SOME REMINISCENCES

of fifteen ; that I have been charged with
the want of patriotism, the want of sense,
and the want of heart too ; that I went
through agonies of self-conflict and shed
secret tears not a few, and had the beauties
of the Furca Pass spoiled for me, and have
been called an " incorrigible Don Quixote,"
in allusion to the book-born madness of the
knight. For that spoil ! They rustle, those
bits of paper — some dozen of them in all.
In that faint, ghostly sound there live the
memories of twenty years, the voices of
rough men now no more, the strong
voice of the everlasting winds, and the
whisper of a mysterious spell, the murmur
of the great sea, which must have somehow
reached my inland cradle and entered my
unconscious ear, like that formula of
Mohammedan faith the Mussulman father
whispers into the ear of his new-born
infant, making him one of the faithful
almost with his first breath. I do not know
whether I have been a good seaman, but
I know I have been a very faithful one.
And after all there is that handful of
" characters " from various ships to prove
that all these years have not been altogether
a dream. There they are, brief, and mono-
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SOME REMINISCENCES

tonous in tone, but as suggestive bits of
writing to me as any inspired page to be
found in literature. But then, you see,
IQ have been called romantic. Well, that
can't be helped. But stay. I seem to
remember that I have been called a realist
also. And as that charge too can be made
out, let us try to live up to it, at whatever
cost, for a change. \With this end in view,
I will confide to you coyly, and only because
there is no one about to see my blushes
by the light of the midnight lamp, that
these suggestive bits of quarter-deck appre-
ciation one and all contain the words
" strictly sober."J

Did I overhear a civil murmur, "That's
very gratifying, to be sure " ? Well, yes,
it is gratifying — thank you. It is at least
as gratifying to be certified sober as to be
certified romantic, though such certificates
would not qualify one for the secretaryship
of a temperance association or for the post
of official troubadour to some lordly demo-
cratic institution such as the London County
Council, for instance. The above prosaic
reflection is put down here only in order
to prove the general sobriety of my judg-
ment in mundane affairs. I make a point

N 193

SOME REMINISCENCES

of it because(a couple of years ago, a certain
short story of mine being published in
a French translation, a Parisian critic — I am
almost certain it was M. Gustave Kahn in
the Gil- Bias— giying me a short notice,

( summed up his rapid impression of the
writer's quality in the words un puissant
reveur. So be it ! Who would cavil at the
words of a friendly reader ? Yet perhaps
not such an unconditional dreamer as all
that. I will make bold to say that neither
at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense
of responsibility. There is more than one
sort of intoxication. Even before the most
seductive reveries I have remained mindful
of that sobriety of interior life, that asceticism
of sentiment, in which alone the naked form
of truth, such as one conceives it, such as
one feels it, can be rendered without shame.
It is but a maudlin and indecent verity
that comes out through the strength of
wine. I have tried to be a sober worker
all my life — all my two lives. I did so from
taste, no doubt, having an instinctive horror

' of losing my sense of full self-possession,
but also from artistic conviction. Yet there
are so many pitfalls on each side of the true
path that, having gone some way, and
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SOME REMINISCENCES

feeling a little battered and weary, as a
middle-aged traveller will from the mere
daily difficulties of the march, I ask myself
whether I have kept always, always faithful
to that sobriety wherein there is power, and
truth, and peace.

As to my sea-sobriety, that is quite
properly certified under the sign-manual
of several trustworthy shipmasters of some
standing in their time. I seem to hear your
polite murmur that " Surely this might
have been taken for granted." Well, no.
It might not have been. That august
academical body the Marine Department
of the Board of Trade takes nothing for
granted in the granting of its lera-ned
degrees. By its regulations issued under
the first Merchant Shipping Act, the very
word SOBER must be written, or a whole
sackful, a ton, a mountain of the most
enthusiastic appreciation will avail you
nothing. The door of the examination
rooms shall remain closed to your tears
and entreaties. The most fanatical advocate
of temperance could not be more pitilessly
fierce in his rectitude than the Marine
Department of the Board of Trade. As
I have been face to face at various times

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SOME REMINISCENCES

with all the examiners of the Port of
London, in my generation, there can be
no doubt as to the force and the continuity
of my abstemiousness. Three of them
were examiners in seamanship, and it was
my fate to be delivered into the hands of
each of them at proper intervals of sea
service. The first of all, tall, spare, with
a perfectly white head and moustache, a
quiet, kindly manner, and an air of benign
intelligence, must, I am forced to conclude,
have been unfavourably impressed by some-
thing in my appearance. His old thin hands
loosely clasped resting on his crossed legs,
he began by an elementary question in a
mild voice, and went on, went on. . . .
It lasted for hours, for hours. Had I been
a strange microbe with potentialities of
deadlv mischief to the Merchant Service
I could not have been submitted to a more
microscopic examination. Greatly reassured
by his apparent benevolence, I had been
at first very alert in my answers. But at
length the feeling of my brain getting addled
crept upon me. And still the passionless
process went on, with a sense of untold
ages having been spent alreadv on mere
preliminaries. Then I got frightened. I was
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SOME REMINISCENCES

not frightened of being plucked ; that
eventuahty did not even present itself to
my mind. It was something much more
serious, and weird. " This ancient person,"
I said to myself, terrified, "is so near his
grave that he must have lost all notion of
time. He is considering this examination
in terms of eternity. It is all very well
for him. His race is run. But I mav
find myself coming out of this room into
the world of men a stranger, friendless,
forgotten by my very landlady, even
were I able after this endless experi-
ence to remember the way to my hired
home." This statement is not so much
of a verbal exaggeration as may be
supposed. Some very queer thoughts
passed through my head while I was con-
sidering my answers ; thoughts which had
nothing to do with seamanship, nor yet
with anything reasonable known to this
earth. I verily believe that at times I was
lightheaded in a sort of languid way. At
last there fell a silence, and that, too,
seemed to last for ages, while, bending over
his desk, the examiner wrote out my pass-
slip slowly with a noiseless pen. He extended
the scrap of paper to me without a word,

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inclined his white head gravely to my
parting bow. . . .

When I got out of the room I felt limply
flat, like a squeezed lemon, and the door-
keeper in his glass cage, where I stopped
to get my hat and tip him a shilling, said :

" Well ! I thought you were never coming
out."

" How long have I been in there ? " I
asked faintly.

He pulled out his watch.

" He kept yon, sir, just under three
hours. I don't think this ever happened
with any of the gentlemen before."

It was only when I got out of the building
that I began to walk on air. And the human
animal being averse from change and timid
before the unknown, I said to myself that
I would not mind really being examined
by the same man on a future occasion.
But when the time of ordeal came round
again the doorkeeper let me into another
room, with the now familiar paraphernalia
of models of ships and tackle, a board for
signals on the wall, a big long table covered
with official forms, and having an unrigged
mast fixed to the edge. The solitary tenant
was unknown to me by sight, though not
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SOME REMINISCENCES

by reputation, which was simply execrable.
Short and sturdy as far as I could judge,
clad in an old, brown, morning-suit, he sat
leaning on his elbow, his hand shading
his eyes, and half averted from the chair
I was to occupy on the other side of the
table. He was motionless, mysterious,
remote, enigmatical, with something
mournful too in the pose, like that statue
of Giuliano (I think) de' Medici shading
his face on the tomb by Michael Angelo,
though, of course, he was far, far from
being beautiful. He began by trying to
make me talk nonsense. But I had been
warned of that fiendish trait, and con-
tradicted him with great assurance. After
a while he left off. So far good. But his
immobility, the thick elbow on the table,
the abrupt, unhappy voice, the shaded
and averted face grew more and more
impressive. He kept inscrutably silent for
a moment, and then, placing me in a ship
of a certain size, at sea, under certain con-
ditions of weather, season, locality, &c. &c.
— all very clear and precise — ordered me to
execute a certain manoeuvre. Before I was
half through with it he did some material
damage to the ship. Directly I had grappled

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with the difficulty he caused another to
present itself, and when that too was
met he stuck another ship before me,
creating a very dangerous situation. I felt
slightly outraged by this ingenuity in piling
up trouble upon a man.

" I wouldn't have got into that mess,"
I suggested mildly. " I could have seen that
ship before."

He never stirred the least bit.
No, you couldn't. The weather's thick."
Oh ! I didn't know," I apologised
blankly.

I suppose that after all I managed to
stave off the smash with sufficient approach
to verisimilitude, and the ghastly business
went on. You must understand that the
scheme of the test he was applying to me
was, I gathered, a homeward passage —
the sort of passage I would not wish to my
bitterest enemy. That imaginary ship
seemed to labour under a most compre-
hensive curse. It's no use enlarging on
these never-ending misfortunes ; suffice it
to say that long before the end I would
have welcomed with gratitude an oppor-
tunity to exchange into the Flying Dutchman.
Finally he shoved me into the North Sea
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(I suppose) and provided me with a lee-
shore with outlying sandbanks — the Dutch
coast presumably. Distance, eight miles.
The evidence of such implacable animosity
deprived me of speech for quite half a minute.

" Well," he said — for our pace had been
very smart indeed till then.

" I will have to think a little, sir."

" Doesn't look as if there were much
time to think," he muttered sardonically
from under his hand.

" No, sir," I said with some warmth.
" Not on board a ship I could see. But so
many accidents have happened that I really
can't remember what there's left for me to
work with."

Still half averted, and with his eyes
concealed, he made unexpectedly a grunting
remark.

" You've done very well."

" Have I the two anchors at the bow,
sir ? " I asked.

" Yes."

I prepared myself then, as a last hope
for the ship, to let them both go in the
most effectual manner, when his infernal
system of testing resourcefulness came into
play again.

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" But there's only one cable. You've lost
the other."

It was exasperating.

" Then I would back them, if I could,
and tail the heaviest hawser on board on
the end of the chain before letting go, and
if she parted from that, which is quite
likely, I would just do nothing. She would
have to go."

" Nothing more to do, eh ? "

" No, sir. I could do no more."

He gave a bitter half -laugh.

" You could always say your prayers."

He got up, stretched himself, and yawned
slightly. It was a sallow, strong, unamiable
face. He put me in a surly, bored fashion
through the usual questions as to lights and
signals, and I escaped from the room thank-
fully— passed ! Forty minutes ! And again
I walked on air along Tower Hill, where
so many good men had lost their heads,
because, I suppose, they were not resource-
ful enough to save them. And in my heart
of hearts I had no objection to meeting
that examiner once more when the third
and last ordeal became due in another
year or so. I even hoped I should. I knew
the worst of him now, and forty minutes
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is not an unreasonable time. Yes, I dis-
tinctly hoped , . .

But not a bit of it. When I presented
myself to be examined for Master the
examiner who received me was short,
plump, with a round, soft face in grey,
fluffy whiskers, and fresh, loquacious
lips.

He commenced operations with an easy-
going " Let's see. H'm. Suppose you tell
me all you know of charter-parties." He
kept it up in that style all through, wandering
off in the shape of comment into bits out
of his own life, then pulling himself up
short and returning to the business in
hand. It was very interesting. " What's
your idea of a jury-rudder now ? " he queried
suddenly, at the end of an instructive
anecdote bearing upon a point of stowage.

I warned him that I had no experience
of a lost rudder at sea, and gave him two
classical examples of makeshifts out of a
text-book. In exchange he described to
me a jury-rudder he had invented himself
years before, when in command of a 3C00-
ton steamer. It was, I declare, the cleverest
contrivance imaginable. " May be of use
to you some day," he concluded. " You will

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go into steam presently. Everybody goes
into steam."

There he was wrong. I never went into
steam — not really. If I only live long enough
I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead
barbarism, a sort of monstrous antiquity,
the only seaman of the dark ages who had
never gone into steam — not really.

Before the examination was over he
imparted to me a few interesting details
of the transport service in the time of the
Crimean War.

" The use of wire rigging became general
about that time too," he observed. " I was
a very young master then. That was before
you were born."

Yes, sir. I am of the year 1857."
The Mutiny year," he commented, as
if to himself, adding in a louder tone that
his ship happened then to be in the Gulf
of Bengal, employed under a Government
charter.

Clearly the transport service had been
the making of this examiner, who so un-
expectedly had given me an insight into
his existence, awakening in me the sense
of the continuity of that sea-life into which
I had stepped from outside ; giving a touch
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of human intimacy to the machinery of
official relations. I felt adopted. His
experience was for me, too, as though he
had been an ancestor.

Writing my long name (it has twelve
letters) with laborious care on the slip of
blue paper, he remarked :

" You are of Polish extraction."

" Born there, sir."

He laid down the pen and leaned back
to look at me as it were for the first time.

" Not many of your nationality in our
service, I should think. I never remember
meeting one either before or after I left the
sea. Don't remember ever hearing of one.
An inland people, aren't you ? "

I said yes — very much so. We were
remote from the sea not only by situation,
but also from a complete absence of in-
direct association, not being a commercial
nation at all, but purely agricultural. He
made then the quaint reflection that it was
" a long way for me to come out to begin
a sea-life " ; as if sea-life were not precisely
a life in which one goes a long way from
home.

I told him, smiling, that no doubt I could
have found a ship much nearer my native

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place, but I had thought to myself that if
I was to be a seaman then I would be a
British seaman and no other. It was a
matter of deliberate choice.

He nodded slightly at that ; and as he
kept on looking at me interrogatively, I
enlarged a little, confessing that I had spent
a little time on the way in the Mediterranean
and in the West Indies. I did not want
to present myself to the British Merchant
Service in an altogether green state. It
was no use telling him that my mysterious
invocation was so strong that my very wild
oats had to be sown at sea. It was the
exact truth, but he would not have under-
stood the somewhat exceptional psychology
of my sea-going, I fear.

" I suppose you've never come across
one of your countrymen at sea. Have you
now ? "

I admitted I never had. The examiner
had given himself up to the spirit of gossiping
idleness. For myself, I was in no haste
to leave that room. Not in the least. The
era of examinations was over. I would
never again see that friendly man who was a
professional ancestor, a sort of grandfather
in the craft. Moreover, I had to wait till
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SOME REMINISCENCES

he dismissed me, and of that there was no
sign. As he remained silent, looking at me,
I added :

" But I have heard of one, some years
ago. He seems to have been a boy serving
his time on board a Liverpool ship, if I am
not mistaken."

" Wliat was his name ? '*

I told him.

" How did you say that ? " he asked,
puckering up his eyes at the uncouth
sound.

I repeated the name very distinctly.

" How do you spell it ? "

I told him. He moved his head at the
impracticable nature of that name, and
observed :

" It's quite as long as your own — isn't
it?"

There was no hurry. I had passed for
Master, and I had all the rest of my life
before me to make the best of it. That
seemed a long time. I went leisurely through
a small mental calculation, and said :

" Not quite. Shorter by two letters, sir."

" Is it ? " The examiner pushed the
signed blue slip across the table to me,
and rose from his chair. Somehow this

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seemed a very abrupt ending of our relations,
and I felt almost sorry to part from that
excellent man, who was master of a ship
before the whisper of the sea had reached
my cradle. He offered me his hand and
wished me well. He even made a few steps
towards the door with me, and ended with
good-natured advice.

" I don't know what may be your plans
but you ought to go into steam. When a
man has got his master's certificate it's the
proper time. If I were you I would go into
steam."

I thanked him, and shut the door behind
me definitely on the era of examinations.
But that time I did not walk on air, as on
the first two occasions. I walked across
the Hill of many beheadings with measured
steps. It was a fact, I said to myself,
that I was now a British master mariner
beyond a doubt. It was not that I had
an exaggerated sense of that very modest
achievement, with which, however, luck,
opportunity, or any extraneous influence
could have had nothing to do. That fact,
satisfactory and obscure in itself, had for
me a certain ideal significance. It was an
answer to certain outspoken scepticism,
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SOME REMINISCENCES

and even to some not very kind aspersions.
I had vindicated myself from what had
been cried upon as a stupid obstinacy or
a fantastic caprice. I don't mean to say
that a whole country had been convulsed
by my desire to go to sea. But for a boy
between fifteen and sixteen, sensitive enough,
in all conscience, the commotion of his little
world had seemed a very considerable thing
indeed. So considerable that, absurdly
enough, the echoes of it linger to this day.
I catch myself in hours of solitude and
retrospect meeting arguments and charges
made thirty-five years ago by voices now
for ever still ; finding things to say that an
assailed boy could not have found, simply
because of the mysteriousness of his impulses
to himself. I understood no more than
the people who called upon ixie to explain
myself. There was no precedent. I verily
believe mine was the only case of a boy of
my nationality and antecedents taking a,
so to speak, standing jump out of his racial
surroundings and associations. For you
must understand that there was no idea
of any sort of " career " in my call. Of
Russia or Germany there could be no
question. The nationality, the antecedents,

o 209

SOME REMINISCENCES

made it impossible. The feeling against
the Austrian service was not so strong,
and I dare say there would have been no
difficulty in finding my way into the Naval
School at Pola. It would have meant six
months' extra grinding at German, perhaps,
but I was not past the age of admission, and
in other respects I was well qualified. This
expedient to palliate my folly was thought
of — but not by me. I must admit that in
that respect my negative was accepted
at once. That order of feeling was com-
prehensible enough to the most inimical
of my critics. I was not called upon to
offer explanations ; the truth is that what
I had in view was not a naval career, but
the sea. There seemed no way open to it
but through France. I had the language at
any rate, and of all the countries in Europe
it is with France that Poland has most
connection. There were some facilities for
having me a little looked after, at first.
Letters were being written, answers were
being received, arrangements were being
made for my departure for Marseilles,
where an excellent fellow called Solary,
got at in a roundabout fashion through
various French channels, had promised
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SOME REMINISCENCES

good-naturedly to put le jeune homme in
the way of getting a decent ship for his first
start if he really wanted a taste of ce metier
de chien.

I watched all these preparations grate-
fully, and kept my own counsel. But what
I told the last of my examiners w^as perfectly
true. Already the determined resolve, that
" if a seaman, then an English seaman,"
was formulated in my head though, of
course, in the Polish language. I did not
know six words of English, and I was
astute enough to understand that it was
much better to say nothing of my purpose.
As it was I was already looked upon as
partly insane, at least by the more distant
acquaintances. The principal thing was to
get away. I put my trust in the good-
natured Solary's very civil letter to my
uncle, though I was shocked a little by the
phrase about the metier de chien.

This Solary (Baptistin), when I beheld
him in the flesh, turned out a quite young
man, very good-looking, with a fine black,
short beard, a fresh complexion, and soft,
merry black eyes. He was as jovial and
good-natured as any boy could desire. I was
still asleep in my room in a modest hotel

2H

SOME REMINISCENCES

near the quays of the old port, after the
fatigues of the journey via Vienna, Zurich,
Lyons, when he burst in flinging the shutters
open to the sun of Provence and chiding
me boisterously for lying abed. How
pleasantly he startled me by his noisy
objurgations to be up and off instantly
for a " three years' campaign in the South
Seas." O magic words ! Une campagne de
trots arts dans les mers du sud " — that is
the French for a three years' deep-water
voyage.

He gave me a delightful waking, and his
friendliness was unwearied ; but I fear
he did not enter upon the quest for
a ship for me in a very solemn spirit. He
had been at sea himself, but had left off
at the age of twenty-five, finding he could
earn his living on shore in a much more
agreeable manner. He was related to an
incredible number of Marseilles well-to-do
families of a certain class. One of his uncles
was a ship-broker of good standing, with a
large connection amongst English ships ;
other relatives of his dealt in ships' stores,
owned sail-lofts, sold chains and anchors,
were master-stevedores, J caulkers, ship-
wrights. His grandfather (I think) was a
212

SOME REMINISCENCES

dignitary of a kind, the Syndic of the
Pilots. I made acquaintances amongst these
people, but mainly amongst the pilots.
The very first whole day I ever spent on
salt water was by invitation, in a big
half-decked pilot-boat, cruising under close
reefs on the look-out, in misty, blowing
weather, for the sails of ships and the
smoke of steamers rising out there, beyond
the slim and tall Planier lighthouse cutting
the line of the wind-swept horizon with a
white perpendicular stroke. They were
hospitable souls, these sturdy Provengal
seamen. Under the general designation of
le petit ami de Baptistin I was made the
guest of the Corporation of Pilots, and had
the freedom of their boats night or day.
And many a day and a night too did I spend
cruising with these rough, kindly men,
under whose auspices my intimacy with the
sea began. Many a time " the little friend
of Baptistin " had the hooded cloak of the
Mediterranean sailor thrown over him by
their honest hands while dodging at night
under the lee of Chateau d'lf on the watch
for the lights of ships. Their sea-tanned
faces, whiskered or shaved, lean or full,
with the intent wrinkled sea-eyes of the

213

SOME REMINISCENCES

pilot-breed, and here and there a thin
gold hoop at the lobe of a hairy ear, bent
over my sea-infancy. The first operation
of seamanship I had an opportunity of
observing was the boarding of ships at sea,
at all times, in all states of the weather.
They gave it to me to the full. And I have
been invited to sit in more than one tall,
dark house of the old town at their hospitable
board, had the bouillabaisse ladled out into
a thick plate by their high-voiced, broad-
browed wives, talked to their daughters —
thick-set girls, with pure profiles, glorious
masses of black hair arranged with compli-
cated art, dark eyes, and dazzlingly white
teeth.

I had also other acquaintances of quite
a different sort. One of them, Madame
Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in
a statuesque style, would carry me off
now and then on the front seat of her
carriage to the Prado, at the hour of fashion-
able airing. She belonged to one of the
old aristocratic families in the south. In
her haughty weariness she used to make
me think of Lady Dedlock in Dickens's
" Bleak House," a work of the master for
which I have such an admiration, or rather
214

SOME REMINISCENCES

such an intense and unreasoning affection,
dating from the days of my childhood,
that its very weaknesses are more precious
to me than the strength of other men's
work. I have read it innumerable times,
both in Polish and in English ; I have read
it only the other day, and, by a not very
surprising inversion, the Lady Dedlock of
the book reminded me strongly of the
belle Madame Delestang.

Her husband (as I sat facing them both),
with his thin bony nose, and a perfectly
bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped
together as it were by short formal side-
whiskers, had nothing of Sir Leicester
Dedlock's "grand air" and courtly solemnity.
He belonged to the haute bourgeoisie only,
and was a banker, with whom a modest
credit had been opened for my needs.
He was such an ardent — no, such a frozen-
up, mummified Royalist that he used in
current conversation turns of speech con-
temporary, I should say, with the good
Henri Quatre; and when talking of money
matters reckoned not in francs, like the
common, godless herd of post-Revolutionary
Frenchmen, but in obsolete and forgotten
ecus — ecus of all money units in the world !

215

SOME REMINISCENCES

— as though Louis Quatorze were still
promenading in royal splendour the gardens
of Versailles, and Monsieur de Colbert busy
with the direction of maritime affairs. You
must admit that in a banker of the nineteenth
century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy. Luckily
in the counting-house (it occupied part of
the ground floor of the Delestang town
residence, in a silent, shady street) the
accounts were kept in modern money, so
that I never had any difficulty in making
my wants known to the grave, low-
voiced, decorous. Legitimist (I suppose)
clerks, sitting in the perpetual gloom of
heavily barred windows behind the sombre,
ancient counters, beneath lofty ceilings with
heavily moulded cornices. I always felt on
going out as though I had been in the temple
of some very dignified but completely tem-
poral religion. And it was generally on
these occasions that under the great carriage
gateway Lady Ded — I mean Madame
Delestang, catching sight of my raised
hat, would beckon me with an amiable
imperiousness to the side of the carriage,
and suggest with an air of amused non-
chalance, " Venez done faire un tour avec
nousy'' to which the husband would add
216

SOME REMINISCENCES

an encouraging " Cest pa. Allons, montez,
jeune homme.^'' He questioned me some-
times, significantly but with perfect tact
and delicacy, as to the way I employed my
time, and never failed to express the hope
that I wrote regularly to my " honoured
uncle." I made no secret of the way I
employed my time, and I rather fancy
that my artless tales of the pilots and so on
entertained Madame Delestang, so far as
that ineffable woman could be entertained
by the prattle of a youngster very full
of his new experience amongst strange
men and strange sensations. She expressed
no opinions, and talked to me very little ;
yet her portrait hangs in the gallery of
my intimate memories, fixed there by a
short and fleeting episode. One day, after
putting me down at the corner of a street,
she offered me her hand, and detained me
by a slight pressure, for a moment. While
the husband sat motionless and looking
straight before him, she leaned forward
in the carriage to say, with just a shade
of warning in her leisurely tone : " /Z
Jaut, cependant, faire attention a ne pas
gdter sa vie.'' I had never seen her face
so close to mine before. She made my

217

SOME REMINISCENCES

heart beat, and caused me to remain
thoughtful for a whole evening. Certainly
one must, after all, take care not to spoi
one's life. But she did not know — nobody
could know — how impossible that danger
seemed to me.

218

VII

Can the transports of first love be calmed,
checked, turned to a cold suspicion of the
future by a grave quotation from a work on
Political Economy ? I ask — is it conceive-
able ? Is it possible ? Would it be right ?
With my feet on the very shores of the sea
and about to embrace my blue-eyed dream,
what could a good-natured warning as to
spoiling one's life mean to my youthful
passion ? It was the most unexpected and
the last too of the many warnings I had
received. It sounded to me very bizarre — and,
uttered as it was in the very presence of
my enchantress, like the voice of folly, the
voice of ignorance. But I was not so callous
or so stupid as not to recognise there also
the voice of kindness. And then the vague-
ness of the warning — because what can be
the meaning of the phrase : to spoil one's
life ? — arrested one's attention by its air
of wise profundity. At any rate, as I have
said before, the words of la belle Madame
Delestang made me thoughtful for a whole

219

SOME REMINISCENCES

evening. I tried to understand and tried
in vain, not having any notion of life as
an enterprise that could be mismanaged.
But I left off being thoughtful shortly
before midnight, at which hour, haunted
by no ghosts of the past and by no visions
of the future, I walked down the quay of
the Vieux Port to join the pilot-boat of
my friends. I knew where she would be
waiting for her crew, in the little bit of a
canal behind the Fort at the entrance of
the harbour. The deserted quays looked
very white and dry in the moonlight and
as if frost-bound in the sharp air of that
December night. A prowler or two slunk
by noiselessly ; a custom-house guard,
soldier-like, a sword by his side, paced
close under the bowsprits of the long row
of ships moored bows on opposite the
long, slightly curved, continuous flat wall
of the tall houses that seemed to be
one immense abandoned building with in-
numerable windows shuttered closely. Only
here and there a small dingy cafe for
sailors cast a yellow gleam on the bluish
sheen of the flagstones. Passing by, one
heard a deep murmur of voices inside —
nothing more. How quiet everything was
220

SOME REMINISCENCES

at the end of the quays on the last night
on which I went out for a service cruise
as a guest of the Marseilles pilots! Not a
footstep, except my own, not a sigh, not a
whispering echo of the usual revelry going
on in the narrow unspeakable lanes of the
Old Town reached my ear — and suddenly,
with a terrific jingling rattle of iron and
glass, the omnibus of the Jolliette on its last
journey swung round the corner of the
dead wall which faces across the paved
road the characteristic angular mass of
the Fort St. Jean. Three horses trotted
abreast with the clatter of hoofs on the
granite setts, and the yellow, uproarious
machine jolted violently behind them,
fantastic, lighted up, perfectly empty
and with the driver apparently asleep on
his swaying perch above that amazing
racket. I flattened myself against the wall
and gasped. It was a stunning experience.
Then after staggering on a few paces in
the shadow of the Fort casting a darkness
more intense than that of a clouded night
upon the canal, I saw the tiny light of a
lantern standing on the quay, and became
aware of muffled figures making towards
it from various directions. Pilots of the

221

SOME REMINISCENCES

Third Company hastening to embark. Too
sleepy to be talkative they step on board
in silence. But a few low grunts and an
enormous yawn are heard. Somebody even
ejaculates : " Ah ! Coquin de sort ! " and
sighs wearily at his hard fate.

The patron of the Third Company (there
were five companies of pilots at that time,
I believe) is the brother-in-law of my friend
Solary (Baptistin), a broad-shouldered, deep-
chested man of forty, with a keen, frank
glance which always seeks your eyes. He
greets me by a low, hearty " He, Vami.
Comment va ? " With his clipped moustache
and massive open face, energetic and at
the same time placid in expression, he
is a fine specimen of the southerner of the
calm type. For there is such a type in which
the volatile southern passion is transmuted
into solid force. He is fair, but no one
could mistake him for a man of the north
even by the dim gleam of the lantern
standing on the quay. He is worth a dozen
of your ordinary Normans or Bretons, but
then, in the whole immense sweep of the
Mediterranean shores, you could not find
half a dozen men of his stamp.

Standing by the tiller, he pulls out his
222

SOME REMINISCENCES

watch from under a thick jacket and bends
his head over it in the hght cast into the
boat. Time's up. His pleasant voice
commands in a quiet undertone " Larguez.''
A suddenly projected arm snatches the
lantern off the quay — and, warped along
by a line at first, then with the regular
tug of four heavy sweeps in the bow, the
big half-decked boat full of men glides
out of the black breathless shadow of the
Fort. The open water of the avani-port
glitters under the moon as if sown over
with millions of sequins, and the long white
breakwater shines like a thick bar of solid
silver. With a quick rattle of blocks and
one single silky swish, the sail is filled by a
little breeze keen enough to have come
straight down from the frozen moon, and
the boat, after the clatter of the hauled-in
sweeps, seems to stand at rest, surrounded
by a mysterious whispering so faint and
unearthly that it may be the rustling of the
brilliant, over-powering moonrays breaking
like a rain-shower upon the hard, smooth,
shadowless sea.

I may well remember that last night
spent with the pilots of the Third Company.
I have known the spell of moonlight since,

223

SOME REMINISCENCES

on various seas and coasts — coasts of forests,
of rocks, of sand dunes — but no magic
so perfect in its revelation of unsuspected
character, as though one were allowed to
look upon the mystic nature of material
things. For hours I suppose no word was
spoken in that boat. The pilots seated in
two rows facing each other dozed with
their arms folded and their chins resting
upon their breasts. They displayed a great
variety of caps : cloth, wool, leather, peaks,
ear-flaps, tassels, with a picturesque round
heret or two pulled down over the brows ;
and one grandfather, with a shaved, bony
face and a great beak of a nose, had a
cloak with a hood which made him look
in our midst like a cowled monk being
carried off goodness knows where by that
silent company of seamen — quiet enough
to be dead.

My fingers itched for the tiller and in due
course my friend, the patron, surrendered
it to me in the same spirit in which the
family coachman lets a boy hold the reins
on an easy bit of road. There was a great
solitude around us ; the islets ahead, Monte
Cristo and the Chateau d'lf in full light,
seemed to float towards us — so steady, so
224

SOME REMINISCENCES

imperceptible was the progress of our boat.
" Keep her in the furrow of the moon,"
the patron directed me in a quiet murmur,
sitting down ponderously in the stern-sheets
and reaching for his pipe.

The pilot station in weather like this
was only a mile or two to the westward of
the islets ; and presently, as we approached
the spot, the boat we were going to relieve
swam into our view suddenly, on her way
home, cutting black and sinister into the
wake of the moon under a sable wing,
while to them our sail must have been a
vision of white and dazzling radiance.
Without altering the course a hair's-breadth
we slipped by each other within an oar's-
length. A drawling sardonic hail came out
of her. Instantly, as if by magic, our dozing
pilots got on their feet in a body. An
incredible babel of bantering shouts burst
out, a jocular, passionate, voluble chatter,
which lasted till the boats were stern to
stern, theirs all bright now and with a
shining sail to our eyes, we turned all black
to their vision, and drawing away from
them under a sable wing. That extraordinary
uproar died away almost as suddenly as
it had begun ; first one had enough of

p 225

SOME REMINISCENCES

it and sat down, then another, then three
or four together, and when all had left off
with mutters and growling half-laughs the
sound of hearty chuckling became audible,
persistent, unnoticed. The cowled grand-
father was very much entertained some-
where within his hood.

He had not joined in the shouting of jokes,
neither had he moved the least bit. He
had remained quietly in his place against
the foot of the mast. I had been given to
understand long before that he had the
rating of a second-class able seaman (matelot
leger) in the fleet which sailed from Toulon
for the conquest of Algeria in the year of
grace 1830. And, indeed, I had seen and
examined one of the buttons of his old
brown patched coat, the only brass button
of the miscellaneous lot, flat and thin,
with the words Equipages de ligne engraved
on it. That sort of button, I believe, went
out with the last of the French Bourbons.
" I preserved it from the time of my Navy
Service," he explained, nodding rapidly his
frail, vulture-like head. It was not very
likely that he had picked up that relic in
the street. He looked certainly old enough
to have fought at Trafalgar — or at any rate
22G

SOME REMINISCENCES

to have played his httle part there as a
powder-monkey. Shortly after we had been
introduced he had informed me in a Franco-
Proven9al jargon, mumbling tremulously
with his toothless jaws, that when he was a
" shaver no higher than that " he had seen
the Emperor Napoleon returning from Elba.
It was at night, he narrated vaguely, with-
out animation, at a spot between Frejus
and Antibes in the open country. A big fire
had been lit at the side of the cross-roads.
The population from several villages had
collected there, old and young — down
to the very children in arms, because the
women had refused to stay at home. Tall
soldiers wearing high, hairy caps, stood
in a circle facing the people silently, and
their stern eyes and big moustaches were
enough to make everybody keep at a
distance. He, " being an impudent little
shaver," wriggled out of the crowd, creeping
on his hands and knees as near as he dared
to the grenadiers' legs, and peeping through
discovered standing perfectly still in the
light of the fire " a little fat fellow in a
three-cornered hat, buttoned up in a long
straight coat, with a big pale face, inclined
on one shoulder, looking something like a

227

SOME REMINISCENCES

priest. His hands were clasped behind his
back. ... It appears that this was the
Emperor," the Ancient commented with
a faint sigh. He was staring from the
ground with all his might, when " my poor
father," who had been searching for his
boy frantically everywhere, pounced upon
him and hauled him away by the ear.

The tale seems an authentic recollection.
He related it to me many times, using the
very same words. The grandfather honoured
me by a special and somewhat embarrassing
predilection. Extremes touch. He was the
oldest member by a long way in that
Company, and I was, if I may say so, its
temporarily adopted baby. He had been
a pilot longer than any man in the boat
could remember ; thirty — forty years. He
did not seem certain himself, but it could
be found out, he suggested, in the archives
of the Pilot-office. He had been pensioned
off years before, but he went out from
force of habit ; and, as my friend the
patron of the Company once confided to
me in a whisper, " the old chap did no
harm. He was not in the way." They
treated him with rough deference. One and
another would address some insignificant
228

SOME REMINISCENCES

remark to him now and again, but nobody
really took any notice of what he had to
say. He had survived his strength, his
usefulness, his very wisdom. He wore long,
green, worsted stockings, pulled up above
the knee over his trousers, a sort of woollen
nightcap on his hairless cranium, and wooden
clogs on his feet. Without his hooded cloak
he looked like a peasant. Half a dozen
hands would be extended to help him on
board, but afterwards he was left pretty
much to his own thoughts. Of course he
never did any work, except, perhaps, to
cast off some rope when hailed: "jff^,
VAncien ! let go the halyards there, at
your hand " — or some such request of an
easy kind.

No one took notice in any way of the
chuckling within the shadow of the hood.
He kept it up for a long time with intense
enjoyment. Obviously he had preserved
intact the innocence of mind which is
easily amused. But when his hilarity had
exhausted itself, he made a professional
remark in a self-assertive but quavering
voice :

" Can't expect much work on a night
like this."

229

SOME REMINISCENCES

No one took it up. It was a mere truism.
Nothing under canvas could be expected
to make a port on such an idle night of
dreamy splendour and spiritual stillness.
We would have to glide idly to and fro,
keeping our station within the appointed
bearings, and, unless a fresh breeze sprang
up with the dawn, we would land before
sunrise on a small islet that, within
two miles of us, shone like a lump of
frozen moonlight, to " break a crust and
take a pull at the wine bottle." I was
familiar with the procedure. The stout
boat emptied of her crowd would nestle
her buoyant, capable side against the
very rock — such is the perfectly smooth
amenity of the classic sea when in a
gentle mood. The crust broken, and the
mouthful of wine swallowed — it was
literally no more than that with this
abstemious race — ^the pilots would pass
the time stamping their feet on the
slabs of sea-salted stone and blowing
into their nipped fingers. One or two mis-
anthropists would sit apart perched on
boulders like man-like sea-fowl of solitary
habits ; the sociably disposed would gossip
scandalously in little gesticulating knots ;
230

SOME REMINISCENCES

and there would be perpetually one or
another of my hosts taking aim at the empty
horizon with the long, brass tube of the
telescope, a heavy, murderous-looking piece
of collective property, everlastingly changing
hands with brandishing and levelling move-
ments. Then about noon (it was a short
turn of duty — the long turn lasted twenty-
four hours) another boatful of pilots would
relieve us — and we should steer for the
old Phoenician port, dominated, watched
over fi'om the ridge of a dust-grey arid
hill by the red-and-white-striped pile of the
Notre Dame de la Garde.

All this came to pass as I had foreseen
in the fullness of my very recent experience.
But also something not foreseen by me
did happen, something which causes me to
remember my last outing with the pilots.
It was on this occasion that my hand
touched, for the first time, the side of an
English ship.

No fresh breeze had come with the dawn,
only the steady little draught got a more
keen edge on it as the eastern sky became
bright and glassy with a clean, colourless
light. It was while we were all ashore on
the islet that a steamer was picked up by

231

SOME REMINISCENCES

the telescope, a black speck like an insect
posed on the hard edge of the offing. She
emerged rapidly to her water-line and came
on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak
of smoke slanting away from the rising
sun. We embarked in a hurry, and headed
the boat out for our prey, but we hardly
moved three miles an hour.

She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer
of a type that is to be met on the sea no
more, black hull, with low, white super-
structures, powerfully rigged with three
masts and a lot of yards on the fore ;
two hands at her enormous wheel — steam
steering-gear was not a matter of course
in these days — and with them on the
bridge three others, bulky in thick blue
jackets, ruddy-faced, muffled up, with
peaked caps — I suppose all her officers.
There are ships I have met more than once
and known well by sight whose names
I have forgotten ; but the name of that
ship seen once so many years ago in the
clear flush of a cold pale sunrise I have
not forgotten. How could I — the first
English ship on whose side I ever laid my
hand ! The name — I read it letter by letter
on the bow — was James Westoll. Not very
232

SOME REMINISCENCES

romantic you will say. The name of a
very considerable, well-known and univer-
sally respected North-country shipowner,
I believe. James Westell ! Wliat better
name could an honourable hard-working
ship have ? To me the very grouping of the
letters is alive with the romantic feeling of
her reality as I saw her floating motionless,
and borrowing an ideal grace from the
austere purity of the light.

We were then very near her and, on a
sudden impulse, I volunteered to pull bow
in the dinghy which shoved off at once
to put the pilot on board while our boat,
fanned by the faint air which had attended
us all through the night, went on gliding
gently past the black glistening length
of the ship. A few strokes brought us
alongside, and it was then that, for the very
first time in my life, I heard myself addressed
in English — the speech of my secret choice,
of my future, of long friendships, of the
deepest affections, of hours of toil and
hours of ease, and of solitary hours too,
of books read, of thoughts pursued, of
remembered emotions — of my very dreams !
And if (after being thus fashioned by it
in that part of me which cannot decay)

233

SOME REMINISCENCES

I dare not claim it aloud as my own, then,
at any rate the speech of my children.
Thus small events grow memorable by
the passage of time. As to the quality of
the address itself I cannot say it was very
striking. Too short for eloquence and
devoid of all charm of tone, it consisted
precisely of the three words " Look out
there," growled out huskily above my
head.

It proceeded from a big fat fellow (he
had an obtrusive, hairy double chin) in
a blue woollen shirt and roomy breeches
pulled up very high, even to the level of
his breast-bone, by a pair of braces quite
exposed to public view. As where he stood
there was no bulwark but only a rail and
stanchions I was able to take in at a glance
the whole of his voluminous person from
his feet to the high crown of his soft black
hat, which sat like an absurd flanged cone
on his big head. The grotesque and massive
aspect of that deck hand (I suppose he was
that — very likely the lamp-trimmer) sur-
prised me very much. My course of reading,
of dreaming and longing for the sea had
not prepared me for a sea-brother of that
sort. I never met again a figure in the
234

SOME REMINISCENCES

least like his except in the illustrations
to Mr. W. W. Jacobs' most entertaining
tales of barges and coasters ; but the
inspired talent of Mr. Jacobs for poking
endless fun at poor, innocent sailors in a
prose which, however extravagant in its
felicitous invention, is always artistically
adjusted to observed truth, was not yet.
Pcihaps Mr. Jacobs himself was not yet.
I fancy that, at most, if he had made his
nurse laugh it was about all he had
achieved at that earlv date.

Therefore, I repeat, other disabilities apart,
I could not have been prepared for the
sight of that husky old porpoise. The
object of his concise address was to call
my attention to a rope which he incon-
tinently flung down for me to catch. I caught
it, though it was not really necessary, the
ship having no way on her by that time.
Then everything went on very swiftly. The
dinghy came with a slight bump against
the steamer's side, the pilot, grabbing
the rope ladder, had scrambled half-
way up before I knew that our task of
boarding was done ; the harsh, muffled
clanging of the engine-room telegraph struck
my ear through the iron plate ; my com-

235

SOME REMINISCENCES

panion in the dinghy was urging me to
"shove off — push hard"; and when I
bore against the smooth flank of the first
EngUsh ship I ever touched in my Ufe,
I felt it already throbbing under my open
palm.

Her head swung a little to the west,
pointing towards the miniature lighthouse
of the Jolliette breakwater, far away there,
hardly distinguishable against the land.
The dinghy danced a squashy, splashy jig
in the wash of the wake and turning
in my seat I followed the James Westoll
with my eyes. Before she had gone in
a quarter of a mile she hoisted her flag
as the harbour regulations prescribe for
arriving and departing ships. I saw
it suddenly flicker and stream out on
the flagstaff. The Red Ensign ! In the
pellucid, colourless atmosphere bathing the
drab and grey masses of that southern
land, the livid islets, the sea of pale glassy
blue under the pale glassy sky of that cold
sunrise, it was as far as the eye could reach
the only spot of ardent colour — flame-like,
intense, and presently as minute as the
tiny red spark the concentrated reflection
of a great fire kindles in the clear heart of
236

SOME REMINISCENCES

a globe of crystal. The Red Ensign — the
symbolic, protecting warm bit of bunting
flung wide upon the seas, and destined for
so many years to be the only roof over my
head.

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